Our daddy had as green of a thumb as anyone I have ever known. He could stick a twig in the ground and the thing would grow. A bit exaggerated, but close to the truth. When we first moved to the Sand Creek farm in 1934, the only living thing around were several cottonwood trees and a new grove of trees to the southeast corner of the farm that was used for posts and firewood. Daddy, with the help of a brother or two set up our living quarters in the center of the far East side of what used to be Grandpa John R. Caywood’s farm.

Daddy immediately started planting trees for shade and a windbreak and after that started beautifying the place with trees, shrubs, flowers and things given to him. The Caywood Roses came from a farm that Mama’s sister, Tula and husband Glenn Biby were renting in the early 1940’s. The roses were started by Daddy’s tender care of watering them by hand and protecting them from the summer heat and the winter cold. These deep pink roses were very hardy and spread quickly. The strong fragrance the blooms gave off was likened to the aroma of the red Rose Hair Oil that men and boys used back in that time.

After Willis got out of the Navy and Married Thelma Somers, they first moved into a home on the farm where Willis hired out for farm labor and cut posts from our grove for a living. A few years later, he moved his wife and baby, Doug to Wichita where Jerry and Ronnie were born. Later on, he was offered a better job at American Airlines at Tulsa and moved there where they added Pamela and Patty to the family. On a visit to the Caywood farm he took slips from the rose bush and transplanted them at his Owasso home where they thrived well.

A while after Thelma died in 2006, he decided to move to Georgetown TX to be near his children. He took slips of the roses with him and planted them near his house. Then he brought slips of the roses back to Oklahoma to give to me and they have thrived well here too. The Caywood farm was not cared for after Mama moved to Cherokee in 1963 and all of Daddy’s beautiful shrubs, vines, bushes and flowers died. The Roses I loved so much on the Caywood farm have come back to Oklahoma to me and I hope to pass them on to all of our children to enjoy as much as I did some 75 years ago. I am assuming the roses were originally planted after the Great OK Cherokee Strip Run of Sept 16, 1893.