Coming Up ROSES

In Northern Virginia, a Master Gardener designs an immersive journey in color, drawing upon lessons that stretch from the English countryside to her native Ghana.

- WRITTEN BY GRACE HAYNES WALL

YVONNE TSIKATA couldn't fathom leaving her roses behind. When she and her husband moved from McLean, Virginia, to nearby Great Falls in 2017, Tsikata dug up 10 rose plants and packed them right alongside everything else. Her new home offered more space to plot and play with her growing collection, but it was wildly overgrown with scrub, invasive grasses, and encroaching bamboo thickets—not exactly a blank canvas. She didn’t quite know where to start. “But I knew I had my roses,” Tsikata says.