Digitalis purpurea 'Camelot White' 15 June 2021

 Since the death of my Rosemary on December 8 2020 life in my Kitsilano home has been one of trying to cope with the loss of someone who was with me (or I was with for 52 years. When my mother died in 1972, in my presence and that of Rosemary, she had been part of my life for 30 years. What that means is that at least ¾ of my existence I shared with Rosemary.

There is nothing anybody can say or any counsellor that can help in finding a solution to deal with that loss.

Luckily I have two attentive daughters and two cats, Niño and Niña who attach themselves to me like glue. They are so good at it that I use them to blame (or use them as an excuse) for the fact that in this 2021 I have rarely blogged my daily bitácora. It is not that I have no blog ideas. I just keep postponing it from one day to the next.

For a long while in the weeks preceding the 5 and 6 June open garden to members of the Vancouver Rose Society (hosted by my daughter Hilary and co-hosted by a most friendly Niño) I kept myself busy making the garden as perfect as I could.

But that was melancholic task. I would stop and notice this or that plant that Rosemary had put in or seeded. It felt so intimate, almost as if I had been rummaging through her unmentionables drawer (not that I ever did).

My most salient delaying tactic excuse has been that May and June are the traditional plant scanning months. I have scanned and scanned and even gone beyond the original purpose which was to make the scans accurate images of most (if not all) of the plants that lived, died or survived our gardening since 1986.

I have even done scans which, in all honesty, are “artsy fartsy”. In some cases I have combined plants that were part of Rosemary’s odd snobbery of liking certain wonderful plants and others that may have been considered weeds, except Rosemary pointed out that they had lovely blue flowers like Centaurea cygnus.

So I will remove that lethargic rose thorn that affects my blog block (I hope) with this blog on the common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea ‘Camelot White’.   

In our former Kerrisdale garden, this lowly (but tall) plant was relegated to our laneway garden. Any plant that emerged (the plant seeds itself so you never know what will emerge from one year to the next) in any colour that was not white Rosemary would remove.

There are three of these in our Kitsilano laneway/garage garden growing under very rare Old  Garden Roses.

I did not feel too bad in cutting off this digitalis knowing that the folks of the Vancouver Rose Society will not be returning this year and that this plant may unbottle me into writing more about coping the loss of the love of my life.