I suspect most children wonder about their parents courting — about early family romance — and wonder if their mother and father felt the same passions as other folks. I sometimes asked my mother about those days. Mom talked about it, but it made her uncomfortable, and if I persisted I saw her blush slightly. Occasionally my questions became teasing, and she told me to stop, but I knew she liked to remember because she hummed songs from those days, often “My Wild Irish Rose.”

The wild rose is a native Montana flower, and is mentioned by Captain Meriwether Lewis when he paddled, poled, and portaged his way up the Missouri River on his trek to the Pacific. On June 1, 1805, he wrote in his journal: “The wild rose appears now to be in full bloom.”

Every June 1st I expect to see wild roses. In recent years the plant is considered a nuisance to farmers and ranchers so it mostly survives along fences and country lanes forming a bright, surprisingly alive pink border around fields in late spring.

But I cultivate the wild rose on the riverbank outside my door. I watch it begin to bud every year in late May. My roses have five pink petals with a cluster of bright yellow stamens at the center and a myriad of tiny needle-sharp thorns along the length of their stems. The most common species around my home is the Rosa woodsii, but it can hybridize with others and the petals sometimes vary from pale pink to dark rose. It looks more like a daisy than a rose. The plant is hardy but the flower is fragile. Buds burst all at once, it seems. At first bloom bees swarm, but within a week petals fall and hips begin to form. This brief explosion of beauty signals the start of a new season for me, and I depend on roses to bloom by June 1.

The wild rose reminds me of my mother, because milestones in her life are marked by its flowering.

Mother was born Marguerite Hutchinson in 1901 on the first of June. Wild roses were always in bloom for her birthday. There were not many open fields around Whitefish, Montana, at the start of the 20th century, but Mom and her childhood friends gathered flowers along river and stream banks and intertwined pink roses with white daisies to create garlands and necklaces to wear at birthday picnics. It was the same for Mom and Dad on their wedding day.

On my Mother’s 24th birthday, June 1, 1925, my parents drove their first car, a square-top Model-T Ford coupe, from their wedding at Mom’s home in Whitefish to Dad’s boyhood home at Rollins, where they spent their wedding night. They stopped often along the 25 miles of lakeshore dirt road and gathered bowers of thorn-stemmed roses to celebrate the occasion. I know these things because Mom told me, and I remember them because she was misty eyed and smiling when she confided in me.

Not all of the stops on that honeymoon trip were planned. Prudent travelers dressed in hiking clothes and sturdy boots back then. The unpaved rutty road twisted down to lakeshore and up over steep hills bordered by unstable rock cliffs. Landslides, fallen trees, and ankle-deep mud often interrupted travel. Sharp rocks punctured thin tires. Mom laughed when she told me Dad had to stop and patch three flat tires on that honeymoon trip.

Mom’s three children were born in spring and early summer and our nurseries were often adorned with a single wild rose bud in a crystal vase on the windowsill. Mom teased us, “Watch it closely, maybe you can catch it bloom.”

When I moved from home and lived out of state I was not aware of wild roses. I am sure they grow in other places, but urban areas grow domesticated roses, not wild ones. Wild roses thrive in Montana because they can, because they belong. They are part of the surprise.

Wild roses are like other wild things in Montana; things hardy yet fragile; things tenaciously clinging to existence in a severe environment. Things — plant, animal, mineral — that often surprise me by displaying beauty and mystery in unforeseen places and at unexpected times: a flake of gold in a trout stream, just a glimmer, then gone — a sudden splash in the river when a midnight moon bursts from behind a cloud — a pair of eyes peering from behind a bush, then disappearing with startling swiftness. On visits home I was often surprised by the scent of wild roses when greeting Mom. On spring fishing trips, Dad and I always kept an eye out for wild roses for her table.

Mom had the delicate beauty of the wild rose, but not its hardiness. By middle age she was frail and often bedridden. She suffered from migraines and chilblains and clung tenuously to life in a climate too harsh.

One day in early May I received a phone call telling me my mother was dying. From the airport, I called florists but none stocked wild roses. I called my son on his farm near Arlee and asked him to look along fence lines and drainage ditches but it was too early. When I arrived at the hospital in Helena I searched the valley and down on the Missouri where Captain Lewis described roses nearly two centuries earlier. I found bushes but no blossoms and I knew I would have no roses until June.

Mother’s funeral was held on May 21st, just 10 days too soon. There were many flowers displayed but I closed my eyes to blunt their formal arrangement and imagined they were wild roses — and I tuned out the organ music and hummed “My Wild Irish Rose.”

Irle White grew up in Polson and retired to Libby after a career in education.