Rosa 'Leander' & Clematis 'Taiga' 6 August 2022

Rosa 'Leander' 6 August 2022

Because few come to my August garden and I am not sharing its beauty with my Rosemary I can do stuff I would have never considered in other years. My healthy English Rose, Rosa ‘Leander’ a fave of Rosemary’s came out and I noticed today 6 August 2022, that it had a healthy new cane. It is beautiful so I decided to cut it (!!) to scan it. This means that next year what is left of the cane will not have roses. It is remarkably beautiful, but then there is this other scan of Leander’s new  growth a few days back. 

Rosemary's interest in little things botanical . 

Leander and other roses in my garden

Because I am going to be giving a Zoom talk to the Canadian Rose Society titled Plants & their Rose Companions , I scanned Leander with a companion plant, Clematis ‘Taiga’ that Rosemary planted in the spring of 2020, a few months before she died on 9 December.

This recent scanning obsession of mine is taking me a tad away from my original intent with my plant scanographs which was to be accurate in the visible description of my garden plants. I have become artsy!

And it is fun. Rosemary would approve that I will attempt to convince the folks of the Canadian Rose Society to share their rose garden with other plants.

There is a sad note. After I scan my plants, I  put some of the roses in vases. But most of the plants I throw into my green bin. 

Rosa 'Complicata' 5 August 2022

With a lot of frequency I have written here that what makes us human and separates us from some other earthly life forms is our ability to associate disparate things. In some cases those associations are entirely personal (objective?) involving memories from the past that somehow connect with an event or something seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled in a contemporary setting.

Consider this scan today of the Gallica Rose, Rosa ‘Complicata’. Immediately when I write that I know that not too long ago it would have been written Rosa complicata noting that this beginning-of-the-20^th century introduction once was seen as a species but now it is considered a cultivar which means that some human may have combined the pollen of a couple of roses.

My very large Rosa ‘Complicata’ was given to me 30 years ago by the New Zealander plantsman Alleyne Cook, now deceased, who was well known in the Vancouver garden community of having planted many of the rhododendrons in Stanley Park.

I associate him with an event that happened on Tuesday 2 June 1953. It was lunchtime in my Buenos Aires home. I was 10 years old. My mother called, “Alex, wash your hands and knees (I wore short pants) and come to lunch.”  I answered, “Mother I cannot yet as I am listening to the coronation of my queen.”

On that day Alleyne Cook was working in London in Constance Spry’s School For Girls. In early morning she had told Alleyne, “Please cut some flowers as we are decorating Westminster Abbey for the queen’s coronation."

Today 5 August 2022 I was pruning Complicata as one is supposed to prune a once blooming (unremontant) rose after it has bloomed. She bloomed (for me most roses are female, an exception could be my Rosa ‘James Mason’ and ‘Abraham Darby’) in the beginning of June.

So how would it be possible that I spotted this single flower?

My immediate thought was that this rose, like cats and babies does not necessarily  perform on demand. My Complicata has a life all her own. She provides me with pleasure and beauty but does her own thing.

Immediately I associated this single bloom with my departed Rosemary.

I do not really believe in spirits or ghosts. But since Rosemary died on 9 December 2020 I have coined an expression “absent presence”. That rose was a reminder of what I had in my 52 year marriage to Rosemary. That rose was Rosemary smiling at me in my memory. In that rose I saw her lovely face and hands and reminisced of our good times in bed and out of it. I remembered her deadheading our roses.

Yesterday Hilary came for dinner and when we were getting ready to set the table I told her, “I feel that at any moment Rosemary will come down the stairs to join us.”

Niño (& Niña) - Hosta 'El Niño' 4 August 2022

Today I realized that not only am I twice lucky as I have a lovely Hosta ‘El Niño’ and an equally lovely cat called Niño, but I also have Niño’s sister Niña.

These days they are inseparable from me and when I sit at my oficina to scan my plants, both cats accompany me, and whoever gets in first, sits on a spare stool.

Every day one of the most important actions that I undertake is to take Niño for a walk around the block. I take the same route Rosemary did and I follow her advice never to shout at Niño and just patiently wait for him when he decides to go into a garden. 

Hosta 'El Niño' 4 August 2022

People ask me if he is my cat. We chat so now Niño is well known in the neighbourhood as the cat that walks without a leash and is not afraid of dogs.

In pursuit of the connection between my Hosta 'El Niño' and Niño I want to add that a baby sitter in Spanish (almost always a female) is a niñera. That makes me a niñero.

My scanning of plants is now going beyond my initial purpose 21 years ago to be accurate. Now I am becoming artsy. I am enjoying this. Soon the fall roses will bloom and I will be most active in my oficina. And of course, I will be in good company.

Niño

December 9, 2020 7:35 PM - Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher', top & R. 'The Alexandra Rose' 3 August 2022-

Rosemary's Hands

In spite of my constant every day grief over the loss of my Rosemary on 9 December 2020, while working in the garden, that used to be ours and now is mine (but hers in spirit?), I find myself smiling, sometimes. 

I did this today when the third bloom of my Rosa ‘Mrs Oakley Fisher’ was in bloom. I wrote about the miracle of her surviving here most recently. That first bloom was not quite as yellow, but the second and third had that lovely colour and shape that Rosemary so adored. Not far from Mrs. Oakley Fisher was and English Rose, Rosa ‘The Alexandra Rose’. Both the roses are single, five petaled. The difference in colour is subtle. Looking at those two roses made me think that they shared qualities with Rosemary. She was small, dainty, elegant and definitely subtle. 

I postponed cutting the two roses as I had to do my everyday duty of walking Niño around the block. I did this late in the day and by then both blooms had begun to close for the day (they do this in a combination of their reaction to light. The scan you see here is not an optimum. And to make it fit with Rosermary's hand I had to chop up the rose leaves (something I never do).

I decided to write a blog and use that scan of the two roses. But then I looked for poems of poets I like that used the word dainty. I found none. Dainty translates into Spanish as delicado and for the roses and Rosemary that would be delicadas. I hit pay dirt as I found one of the longest sentences in literature which is in Jorge Luís Borges’s El Aleph. In that sentence, I found this: 

 vi la delicada osatura de una mano 

That translates to I saw the dainty structure of a hand. 

Shortly, a few minutes after Rosemary died I knew I had to take a photograph and I am so glad I did. I photographed her hands on my mother’s red shawl. And that is how the scan and the photo are together as they should be. 

Below is the long sentence. 

The Aleph was a spot in space In the basement of a house in Buenos Aires, an unhappy man, unsuccessful in love and in literature, sees a luminous object about an inch across. The Aleph, that luminous object is a point in space that contains all other spaces at once. 

Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de America, vi una plateada telarana en el centro de una negra piramide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutandose en mi como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me retiejo, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta anos vi en el zaguan de una casa en Fray Bentos, vi racimos, nieve, tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidare, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cancer en el pecho, vi un circulo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un arbol, vi [en] una quinta de Adrogue, un ejemplar de la primera version inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemon Holland, via un tiempo cada letra de cada pagina (de chico, yo solia maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaran y perdieran en el decurso de una noche), vi la noche y el dia contemporaneos, vi un poniente en Queretaro que parecia reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi en un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terraqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplican sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osatura de una mano, via los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja espanola, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernaculo, vi tigres, embolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejercitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajon del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increibles, precisas, que Beatriz habia dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente habia sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulacion de mi oscura sangre, vi el engranaje del amor y la modificacion de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis visceras, vi tu cara, y senti vertigo y llore, porque mis ojos habian visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningun hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.

Jorge Luís Borges

My little essay on not knowing where I belong is followed by a poem by Jorge Luís Borges (In English and in Spanish) where he delves into something which may be very Argentine. He persists in writing about experiences he will never ever have again except through a fading memory. He once stated that to remember one must first forget.

I have friends who have lived were they were born to this day. Rarely do I feel sorry for them. It is sort of like the definition of a genius like Edison, who knew what he wanted to be from a young age.

In my case there is the conflict of coming from a family that travelled and lived in many countries.

Rags, flags & citizenship

My father while born in Buenos Aires had parents from Manchester who moved to Argentina in 1901. My mother was born in Manila but her father was Basque and her mother from Spain.

In 1954 my mother, grandmother and I moved to Mexico City. While there we lived in the Distrito Federal, Veracruz and Nueva Rosita in the State of Coahuila. Because my grandmother was the defacto cultural attaché of the Philippine Embasy (in 1954 it was a ministry) we lived in a large house where she entertained. It was there that I met Rufino Tamayo, Alma Reed, Diego Rivera and Dr. Atl.

When my mother and grandmother talked and wanted to be private in my presence they spoke in Tagalog. I somehow learned a lot of it. 

The Minister of the Philippine Ministry, Narciso Ramos developed a liking for me. It was through him that I met his handsome young son Fidel wearing a West Point uniform. And that is how I met                Fidel Ramos, a good president of the Philippines who died a couple of days ago. His sister Leticia Valdez Ramos-Shahani, who became a Philippine senator, spent 6 months with us in the late 50s in Mexico City. It was with her that I went to see Grace Kelley’s last film, The Swan.

My formative years in high school, I spent in a Catholic boarding school in Texas. It was a life in what then was a liberal city. My only lay teacher, Mr. Marshall taught me American Civics in detail and Brother Francis Barrett took us to a deep exploration of American history.

When I returned to Buenos Aires in 1965 to do my military service in the Argentine Navy, I was exposed (very important) to the music of Astor Piazzolla.

When I married my Canadian wife Rosemary Healey in Mexico City in 1968 I found out about Canada and a man called Pierre Trudeau.

By now you may understand my feeling or lack of feeling of where I belong. I have nostalgia for all those countries and cities.

The strongest is when I listen to the music of Astor Piazzolla. I argue that his music, unlike any other music anywhere else, is the music of one city – Buenos Aires. When I listen to his Oblivion I am  instantly translated to three Buenos Aires. The first one about a lovely women I fell in love with in there in 1965. The second the Buenos Aires of my many returns beginning in 1987. The third one is of going to Buenos Aires three times with my Rosemary.  And there is another one that I have not quite figured out. This was my visit to Buenos Aires this past December 2021 without my Rosemary.

Now that I live alone in my Kits duplex with my two cats Niño and Niña ( I converse in Argentine Spanish with them) I find that I am constantly reading or referencing Jorge Luís Borges and Julio Cortázar.  I have a very large library of their output in Spanish. When I read Borges, Cortázar or Martín Fierro I have this melancholic feeling of isolation that cannot discuss it with anybody. It is then that I plant in perhaps visiting Buenos Aires soon.

Of Mexico I  read PacoTaibo II and Homero Aridjis, who are my friends.

My American side took me to the Vancouver Public Library where I took out and read one of the best autobiographies I have ever read, Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs. I enjoy Newyorican Jerome Charyn. He is my friend.

Of Canadian literature I have enjoyed Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, our Vancouver Poets Laureates, George Bowering , our Canadian Poet Laureate and currently I am enjoying Malcolm Lowry’s               October Ferry to Gabriola.

What am I?    

1964 – Love Poem- by Jorge Luis Borges