Rosa 'Emily Louise' 23 July 2021

In this 21st century particularly in this 2021 I am ambivalent about it. But I do acknowledge that some things, indeed, are better than in the last century.

With my memory for names fading quickly, Google on my phone is a godsend. If one is curious, and I am curious, I don’t have to go to our public library to find esoteric words like comorbidity which I first saw in Spanish as comorbilidad on my on line Argentine newspaper La Nación.

In the 20^th century printing a b+w negative in my darkroom was not only a pleasure but a snap. But with colour it was different, particularly with colour slides. The only method that really worked, which avoided the making of an internegative (lost sharpness in that process), was Cibachrome. Because this product added contrast on very shiny paper, shadow detail would disappear.

Now my 17-year-old Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight tool draws out details from the shadows that were always, I repeat always, there from my negatives, slides and even when I scan my prints. This Photoshop is also very good at finding detail in the shadows of my Fuji X-E3 digital camera photographs.

In my plant scans I always use that shadow/highlight tool.

In my youth I loved the use of the school microscope. I even had a personal one given to me at one Christmas.

Today when I scanned this lovely patio rose (awful definition of this plant) Rosa ‘Emily Louise’ I enlarged it on my monitor to take out dust spots with Photoshop. In the centre I saw a little black speck. I was going to take it out when I became curious…

 

Hosta 'Ben Vernooij' 22 July 2021

Tetraploid plants are produced by treating the terminal buds of diploid plants with colchicine, causing the chromosome number of the meristematic cells inside to double.

The above is a definition that I do not understand fully. In the hosta family of plants where they may be at least 5000 cultivars (plants discovered, selected or played with in a nursery or garden). What I do know is that tetraploid hostas have leaves with more substance (hosta speak for thicker).  The hosta in today’s blog is a tetraploid with a weird name, Hosta ‘Ben Vernooij’. This hosta is a sport of Hosta ‘First Frost’. A sport is usually found in a group of plants that are the same, in this case H. ‘First Frost’ and some keen gardener noticed one plant that was slightly different.

I must state here that at my soon 79^th birthday, there are many hostas in my garden that all look the same even though the plant labels beg to differ with me. My hostas are all nice, to me. and I am no longer obsessed with the idea that I may have plants that may be different.

But I can categorically ascertain right here that while in the last few years I have come to discover how beautiful hosta flowers are (the members of the American Hosta Society are not quite as keen as I am) I am now obsessed in scanning a few every day. Each scan can while away about an hour's time. Niña comes into my oficina and sits on a bench beside me. She meows. I pick her up. She jumps down and leaves. This she repeats until I finally feel guilty and go inside and see if she has food on her dish.

At first I would scan the flowers in one way. Now I am enjoying fiddling around and doing several versions.

The scan here, I think, borders on art. While few may not agree I am contented in knowing that the heretofore ignored hosta flower is as lovely as a flower can be. Best of all I know of no other plant that has flowers that are similar even though in the last botanical review the hosta has become a member of the asparagus family.

Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha' 22 July 2021

In my almost 79 year existence I had a few girlfriends and one wife, my Rosemary. Some of these girlfriends were difficult and some just fine.

In my garden I cultivate roses which are sometimes difficult and hostas which are plain easy. My Rosemary had a liking for grey plants which were difficult. You could not overwater them and you had to find the right place in the sun with them. I am having a hard time especially with her Senecio ‘Angel Wings’.

It is easy, for me, to equate roses with human beings. They can be famous real ones who existed in the past and some have poetic and romantic names.

In this mix of plants is the hydrangea. As long as it gets shade or dappled shade and is watered every now and then it is a dependable shrub. Little poetry has been written about the hydrangea and few know that another name for the hydrangea is hortense which is Latin for garden.

So why is this shrub mostly ignored? On the internet there is lots of information on how to make macrophylla hydrangeas (mopheads) bluer. Because the hydrangea comes from warmer climes only the species Arborescens is hardy in the extreme cold of my eldest daughter’s garden in Lillooet.  This is because the shrub dies down in the fall and next year’s flowers come from new wood.

I wrote here how I had to select only three hydrangeas from our 30 of our former Kerrisdale garden.

One was an easy one as Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Ayesha’ is named after H. (for Henry) Rider Haggard’s sequel to She, Ayesha and we all know that ‘She must be obeyed”.

My scan of Ayesha in three different stages of its flowering (it is unusual to see these three and one more that has more pink all on one bush at the same time) shows the variety and its singular appeal. Not the teacup shaped florets on the large flower.

All the above is about the fact that while my roses remind me of Rosemary’s interest in them, the hydrangea in being dependable, beautiful (not too showy, but my! Rosemary’s legs!) is a plant that is Rosemary.

Every day as I walk to open my oficina door and I glance at Ayesha on one side of the door I am so glad that I  married my Rosemary and not those girlfriends that were difficult or just fine.

For anybody who might wonder, in botanical nomenclature, the species part of a plant's name is italicized while its cultivar (a nursery or garden selection) is not. And the cultivar name is inserted between single quotes.

Hydrangea macrophylla  'Ayesha'

Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' & Rosa 'The Alexandra Rose' - 20 July 2021

My eldest daughter’s name is Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward. The only simple part of her name is that she shares the middle name, Elizabeth with my Rosemary. My youngest granddaughter is Lauren Elizabeth Stewart.

The rest is a bit more complicated.

When I was born on August 32, 1942 (that’s what the Sanatorio Anchorena’s records would confirm) somehow either my parents wanted to hide that I may have been born before their wedding or I may believe my mother who said my father forgot to register me so my birth certificate birthday and in all my other documents has my birth at April 18, 1943.

Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward

My father was called George Waterhouse Hayward so when it came to register me (was that April 18, 1943) he told the registrar that my name was George Alexander Waterhouse-Hayward.

In a nationalistic Argentina of the time the registrar cited a problem. My name could not be in a foreign language. So I became Jorge Alejandro.

I am Alejandro because my godfather was Alejandro Ariosa. He was the second husband of my aunt Ines Barber. Because she was divorced from Ralph Barber, my aunt who adored my mother could not be my godmother as extremely Catholic prohibitions in Argentina then. My godmother became her daughter Inesita, who of course was my first cousin (my fave first cousin).

With my first name and middle name out of the way the man objected to the Waterhouse-Hayward. My father slipped a coima (Argentine for a bribe) under the table and told the man that Waterhouse was part of my surname and that it had a hyphen I the middle.

When my eldest daughter was born on August 17 1968 Rosemary decided that she should be named Alexandra. Unfortunately while her legal name is still that nobody calls her Alexandra. From the moment she was a little girl in the Mexico City suburb of Arboledas where we lived her friends called her Ale (pronounced Ah- leh). She has been Ale ever since.

As soon as my Rosemary found out that David Austin had come out with an English Rose called Princess Alexandra of Kent it was purchased. Ditto she bought the lovely single rose (rosarian term for roses that have only five petals. Species roses also have five petals except this one) called The Alexandra Rose.

Both were in bloom today so I took advantage. 

My special birthday on August 31, 2020

Top, Rosa 'Susan Williams- Ellis', R. 'Escimo', R. 'Margaret Merril', below R. 'Jacqueline du Pré, & R. 'Sombreul' 20 July 2021

White is a colour I have never been able to escape from. It first hit me in my two years in the Argentine Navy when from Spring into fall I had to wear summer whites. This meant that when I traveled in public transport like trains, the colectivos (Buenos Aires buses) and the subte I could never sit down. The same happened if I happened to want to sit on a park bench.

What made my white uniform a bit easier to wear is that against navy regulations I had the pants crease sewn to a permanent razor sharp line.

In my later life I avoided white dress shirts and preferred the Brooks Brothers light blue button down. I remember once in a trip to New York that I went to Brooks Brothers and purchased a couple of those fabulous shirts with my American Express Card. The lugubrious and well-dressed attendant passed the phone to me and said, “The folks at American Express want to have a chat with you.”

When I married Rosemary in 1968 we did not do so by the church. We bought her a white Mexican dress with bluebirds for our appointment with the judge.

That dress has been with us since and even my younger granddaughter Lauren posed for me wearing that dress.

White then became an important colour in our Kerrisdale garden on Athlone Street. Rosemary was a colour snob and only allowed blues and whites in the garden. It was only later that, little by little, she warmed to other colours, particularly yellow.

Today 20 July, 2021 I spotted these five white roses all in bloom. There is a sixth one, Fair Bianca, but the last bloom yesterday had no petals today.

Rosa 'Fair Bianca' 25 May 2021

All these white roses were special to Rosemary and soon became my favourites, too. But there is one rose in this group that Rosemary never saw.

In October, without telling me she purchased from Palatine Roses from Niagara-on-the-Lake three roses without telling me. She hinted a month before she died on December 9 that I had to buy three large Vietnamese terracotta pots (they are fired at high temperatures so they can be left outside during the winter) and a couple of bags of dirt. In February my doorbell rang and outside I found a big box with three roses. One of them was the lovely five petaled Rosa ‘Escimo’

I feel sad that Rosemary never was able to see Escimo but at the same time I glory at her choice that even posthumously she is sharing with me.