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| Two dark roses on right Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' - top and left Rosa ' Duchess of Portland' - below Rosa 'La Belle Sultane' - centre right - Rosa 'Charles de Mills' - 5 June 2025 |
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| Rosa 'Charles de Mills' - 5 June 2025 |
Until I was 8 my favourite color was blue. Then I became obsessed with a da Vinci self-portrait in red. I left blue behind until I met my Rosemary in 1967. Blue was her favourite colour in the garden and only with my effort did she eventually accept orange and yellow in our garden.
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| Leonardo & Robertson Davies |
In my Kitsilano garden I have many red roses. Some are from root stock in which the rose that was grafted to it died. I am happy with all my red roses.
I often quote from my favourite Jorge Luís Borges poem, La Lluvia (The Rain) – “el curioso color del colorado” about a flower called rose. The almost alliteration depends on the fact that in Spanish red and Colorado are identical.
As as the rose scanning season progresses I have to find ways of mating my scans with something that I can write. And so I associate endlessly.
In Spanish as a little boy when my grandmother finished reading me a story she would say, “Colorín, colorado, este cuento se ha acabado.” It translates to “colourful red, this story is finished.”
The first smart joke I ever heard was around 1951 in my Buenos Aires American school, "What is black and white and read all over? The newspaper."
In Argentina to this day upper class snobs refuse to use the word rojo and opt for colorado. They make fun of the “lower classes” that insist on rojo.
My scans of my red roses include my idea that roses past their prime are beautiful in their own way.