"...the flower fadeth..."

I have a little sign in the garden by my favorite rose bush - it says B L O O M and you can see it here.  Well, it worked and my rose bush bloomed like crazy!   There were dozens of buds on it and as you can see below it bloomed into some pretty pink roses.

The rose is a member of the "New Dawn" family of roses.  I believed it's called "Awakening".  It's been blooming along my fence for many years.  Some years it does better than others....this year was a good year for my Awakening Rose.  Look at that pretty bud just beginning to open and look at the next one showing a bit of the pretty pink inside. Then one more showing the promise of all those petals tucked away. I was excited about actually having enough roses for cutting this year. I wanted to put a small bunch on my desk at work.

Then this started happening....brown edges on my roses.  First on just some of the roses but soon....every single one.  Then not just the edges, but the entire petal. Actually the whole rose.

I was so sad and I couldn't figure out exactly what went wrong.  All my rose bushes were fertilized and treated for insects and disease.  I'm definitely not quilty of over-watering, in fact sometimes quite the opposite!  We did have a very rainy Spring. But really I'm not sure what happened.  As I said I was sad but then I started looking closely at the roses and I decided that they look quite beautiful just as they are!

The roses that still have some pink coloring are soft and smooth. The others are dry and papery, a few of them are losing their petals but most are intact and ready to be cut and used in a beautiful dried arrangement.   This rose bush usually blooms several times through the summer .  I wonder what the next bunch of roses will be like!  Any ideas about why the roses all dried out and turned brown? 

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”  Isaiah 40:8