Now is the season of roses and they are adorning West Tisbury roadsides and gardens and fields. I am sternly told by Prudie Burt, who is a gardener and a conservationist, that they shouldn’t be here at all — their fragrance and beauty notwithstanding.

Most of the roses I see tumbling at the edge of fields are multiflora roses, she says, which are an invasive species. She is not sure from where they came but her mother, Ann Burt, remembers the Extension Service of the 1950s urging up-Islanders with farms to edge their fields with them. They were the ideal way to keep the sheep and cows in their respective fields.

Up-Islanders diligently did as they were told and exulted in the fragrance in the June air, as I am exulting in it now.

At the foot of my field I have multiflora roses. Next door, at the Waitzkins’ on Music street, more multiflora roses tumble about. All the way to the Middle Road, I am surrounded by the beauty and the fragrance of them.

Native wild roses, Rosa Rugosa, are almost gone. They are the bushy kind that produce rose hips for jelly. West Tisbury jam and jelly maker, Linda Alley, uses the petals (not the hips) of the Rosa Rugosa for her fragrant, tasty, products.

When I passed Howes House — the council on aging headquarters named for him — I saw that one rosebush was in bloom there. In Joe Howes’ days, back in the 1970s when I moved to West Tisbury and became acquainted with him, pink rambler roses adorned his front fence in late June and July. He was 96 then but until he was 95 he had been walking from one West Tisbury animal farm to the next as the town’s inspector of animals, meat and slaughtering.

At the end of his 95th year, however, he decided he couldn’t walk from farm to farm (and there were many farms then in town) with agility, and he gave up the post. That left more time for looking after the roses on his front fence, and for talking with neighbors about the things he had seen and done in his long life.

I was a frequent, fascinated listener to his stories.

This year, now that I am 93 and edging closer to Joe’s age when we met, a mysterious leg wound kept me off my feet on Middle Road during the lily of the valley days. But I did get to enjoy the gleaming yellow daffodils that Tom Hodgson had planted along Tiasquam Road, where we both live.