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| Sanda Simic's Rosa 'Constance Spry' and Clematis 'Josephine' 05 June 2020 |
It has been written that if no one is around to watch and hear a tree fall in the forest, the event did not happen.
Many in our Vancouver garden community thank those who open their gardens for their generosity. It involves the owners of those gardens to spruce them up and make them as impeccable as possible for those who might be on the critical side.
I am not all sure if all that is true. Rosemary and I sort of enjoy our garden. I think I do enjoy it more than my Rosemary (she who used to cut the grass on the edges of our flower beds) worries about everything being perfect. But if we could not share that garden to me it would be like that falling tree in the forest.
And if you happen to have a rose garden choosing a date to
open it is figuring out which roses will bloom and which ones will take their
time. I have often stated that roses, cats and babies do not perform on demand.
After we opened our garden last week for the Vancouver Rose
Society (it had to be by phone appointment and we could not offer food or
drink) we felt a tad depressed. At the very least the people who came to our
garden saw it and we shared in our minds what they saw and enjoyed their
questions.
We were there to see and hear the tree fall in the garden.
Today we went to visit Sanda Simic’s garden which will also
be open tomorrow and in a week.
She has roses in the front garden, outside the front garden,
under the street trees, in the back garden and in the lane.
My first impression after having to remove my barbijo
(Argentine Spanish for face mask) to smell her many extremely fragrant roses
(Old Roses and English Roses and I have to mention Rosa ‘Aloha’ a parent of
Abraham Darby) is that she had tons of beautiful peonies that looked like roses
and roses that looked like peonies.
On her her garden facing South West, she has lots of sun.
Our Rosa ‘Munstead Wood’ a poor performer in our garden was so large that I did
not know what it was.
I wanted to write about this lovely garden knowing that I
would go crazy scanning those roses if I owned plants like Simic’s. So I found
a tad relief in asking her to cut two flowers for me to scan.
One is Clematis ‘Josephine’ and the other a glorious (mostly free of black spot) Rosa ‘Constance Spry’. I wrote about that rose recently here but I could not resist smelling it in the garden, bringing it home, scanning it and being able to put it into a vase and smell that myrrh for the rest of the day.
Thank you Sanda Simic.