Left- Helleborus x niger 'Honeyhill Joy' & Helleborus 'Honeydew' 17 February 2025

Today marked a beginning in my Kitsilano garden. I removed a few dead canes from my roses and some leaves. Then I noticed the lilac-coloured Helleborus ‘Honeydew’. Rosemary would have smiled upon seeing it as she would have understood that our garden had a pleasant future and that both of us would work at it to make it perfect.

At the same time I remember a striking quote from my one of my two (the other is Julio Cortázar) favourite Argentine novelists Ernesto Sábato. Until 1953 he was a nuclear physicist who for a while worked with Curies in France. He lost his excitement in the future of nuclear energy so he became a novelist. This quote below (in Spanish) is important. I will do my best to translate it.

"La fama es un conjunto de malentendidos, ya se sabe. Es vivir en una vitrina, y para colmo desnudo, porque no hay desnudez más genuina y terrible que la expresión artística, si es auténtica; toda obra de arte es una autobiografía, no en el sentido literal de la palabra, sino en el sentido más profundo y grave: un árbol de Van Gogh es Van Gogh, es su propia y desnuda alma ante nosotros".

"That fame is a combination of misunderstandings is known. It is to live in a glass showcase, and to make it worse, to be nude, because there is no more genuine nakedness, and terrible, than artistic expression, if it is authentic; all work of art is an autobiography, not in the literal sense, but in the most profound and serious: a Van Gogh tree is Van Gogh, it is his own and naked soul that is before us."

Somehow, if I am to understand Sábato, the scan here of the two hellebores, and Rosemary’s framed portrait are Rosemary.

And perhaps even me?