Astrantia major subs involucrata 'Shaggy' 11 June 2025

Today after our extra Sylvia Restaurant tertulia, I invited  my friends Jim Jardine, Ian McGuffie and newly found (we had lost track of her) fantastic photographer, Storme Morrison for a visit to my Kitsilano rose garden. We had a pleasant afternoon. My cat Niño was most social. My youngest daughter Hilary would have told me, “Papi is it nice that you see people and that they visit you.”

I no longer tell her that when people are gone I am immediately left with a profound emptiness. It is a vacancy, an absence of my Rosemary. I know that as soon as I clean up, feed the cats I will have to find some way of writing about this emptiness in my soul.

I spotted Astrantia major subsp. involucrata ‘Shaggy’. This is not the kind of plant you go to a nursery to find. It would be a rare plant these days. Mine was Rosemary’s and it flowers every year. There is a little family story behind this plant, that because the flowers are not colourful, it is that kind plant that a snob (my Rosemary) would like.

Years ago in our Kerrisdale garden, I cut some of the astrantias and put them in a vase in our dining room. A few hours later there was a foul odour. The flowers of the plant were the culprits. I identified the nasty scent to having suffered Mexico City buses in the summer. I told Rosemary that henceforth it was the Mexican Armpit Plant.

Perhaps some months later my eldest daughter inquired about the plant. It seems she had inherited some of her mother’s snobbishness for plants. “Papi, what is the name of the plant?” A few days later she told me that at the nursery they had no idea of a plant called the Mexican Armpit Plant.

Somehow writing about Rosemary’s plant ameliorates my emptiness. Scanning the plant is fun. I have a purpose. That is important.

Of course if I have visitors tomorrow I will be back to square one.

And there is this added information about armpits. In Spanish the word for it is one of the ugliest words in Spanish - sobaco. When we were living in Mexico it took me years to realize that the deodorant that I called odorono was in fact an English combination of odor-no.