Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher' and Rebecca 24 June 2023

I once told my granddaughters that if a fire were consuming my house with them as guests that the first person I would save would be my Rosemary. I am not sure they understood.

Since then, and after many years of many portraits of my family and photographs of numerous people, the picture of my granddaughter Rebecca posing in her Mexican sailor dress and wearing a single tea rose, Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher’ is the one image that I would want to save from a conflagration of my files and or the lovely 20x24 inch drummed scanned  inkjet from a 6x7cm Ektachrome transparency.

When I took the photograph Rebecca (25) was 8. By then I had cemented my technique of never asking children to smile for my camera.

In those days, and now, I believed in lighting my photographs. I took the photograph in the back of our gazebo in our Kerrisdale garden. I used a venerable but most efficient flash unit (inside a softbox) called a Norman 200B. The resulting effect of having one side of the face darker is called Rembrandt lighting. With the advent of using cell phones for portraits that method and idea is forgotten.

Rosemary loved blue and white and banished the warm colours from our garden. But it was this rose that warmed her heart for yellows and then reds and oranges.

Closeup 24 June 2023

 

This rose is not easy to grow and we have had many deaths of it in our rose family. Two months before Rosemary died she told me that I needed to buy some large pots and some soil. She did not explain why. On February 2021, two months after her death, the doorbell rang. Outside was a box containing Mrs. Oakley Fisher and two lookalikes. Rosemary had ordered the rose because our Mrs. Oakley Fisher had succumbed to harsh winter weather. For me this was a posthumous gift.

The new rose subsequently died. I ordered three from Rogue Nursery in Oregon. Two died but this third one has been happily blooming since the beginning of June. I almost did not have the heart to cut this one bloom today. I knew exactly what I was going to do with it. My recent obsessive technique is to use my scanner not only to scan my plants but also as a tabletop camera. I put a print of Rebecca with the rose and you can see the result.

While I did the scan today 24 June 2023 I am putting it back to 22 June to fill the many holes that I have because of my blog block caused by my grief for Rosemary that just will not go away. All I want to do is to lie on my bed with my cats Niño and Niña on top of me. I have become a crazy cat lady as I communicate with them in my native Spanish.

But I feel good in doing this. Rosemary died as did 4 Mrs. Oakley Fishers. This one is a sort of a resurrection.