This seems to be an amazing spring/summer for roses – even mine are looking good (or were until it just started raining), and they are by no means my most successful plants. And it’s not just locally, either. We’ve just been to Amsterdam and Leiden for a few days, in beautiful weather, and roses are burgeoning everywhere from the botanic gardens to the pavements in fronts of the houses.

We were in Amsterdam to see ‘All The Rembrandts’, which is a quite magnificent exhibition at the Rijksmuseum until 10 June, and does what it says on the tin – all their Rembrandts, except ‘The Night Watch’, which stays in the Court of Honour not far away. I was (again) caught out by scale: the famous self-portrait pulling a startled face, which is reproduced everywhere and at all sizes, for example, turns out in reality to be only 50 x 45mm: the image on the Rijksmuseum’s own website is enormously enlarged, and yet it’s perfect. How did he do it all?

Rembrandt, ‘Self-portrait in a Cap, Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed’ (1630). (Credit: the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Anyway, I can’t tell you very much about roses that you won’t know already – the worldwide species, the hundreds of years of cultivation, the thousands of hybrids, the inspiration for art, poetry and music. So I thought I’d just post some of my pictures from the last few days, at home and abroad – no captions, as I have no idea what most of them are. It’s just a shame that you can’t smell them …

Caroline