Rebecca Stewart - May 2003

Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher' - 3 June 2025

"We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space,time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life." Harold Bloom - How To Read and Why (2000).

This book is by my bed and has been since 2005. These days it is particularly in my mind as I lose friends and family by death or they just fade away. They might get rid of their landline or move elsewhere without saying goodbye.

My daughters call me every once in a while. But my granddaughters now influenced by the happenings of this century do not.

Today I noticed that my Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher’ was in bloom. It is not an easy rose to grow. Since my original back in Kerrisdale I may have had five of them. The latest is one of two I purchased from Rogue Nurseries in Oregon.

It was around 2002 that I first saw it at Janet Wood’s garden. She was the president of the Vancouver Rose Society and a friend. As I was leaving I spotted a little yellow rose. I asked her and she told me that it was a single hybrid tea rose called Mrs. Oakley Fisher. Such was the influence of the rose over me that I told Wood, “I am going to go home and make some toast with unsalted butter and apricot jam and I will have it with a large mug of Earl Grey Tea."

I told Rosemary about the rose but she was not interested as she did not like yellow or orange in the garden. I bought the rose anyway and a year later I photographed our eldest granddaughter Rebecca (8 she was) with it while wearing a Mexican sailor dress. That rose, because of the photograph, ushered in yellow into our garden and Mrs. Oakley Fisher became one of our favourite roses.

Two months before Rosemary died on 9 December, 2020, she told me, “Alex you will need to buy three large terracotta pots and some dirt as I think we will need them." I did not connect this with the fact that our little yellow rose had died.

It was in the beginning of February 2021 that the doorbell rang and I found a box with three roses. One was Mrs. Oakley Fisher and the other two were similar.  This was a posthumous gift from Rosemary. I cried.

By then our family had fractured and I saw little of my daughters and my granddaughters pretty well disappeared from my life. Rosemary was our family glue.

I live with my two cats missing, every day the presence of my Rosemary and the warmth of all those family gatherings we used to have.

Today when I did see that little yellow rose I noticed that it was missing a fifth petal (or it has what looks like a very small one) and I immediately equated the rose with my granddaughter’s now almost permanent absence.