Rosa 'Olivier Roellinger' 28 August 2025

Rosa 'Queen of Sweden' 26 August 2025

Not much was in bloom today except for Rosemary’s dahlia and some of my hosta flowers. I thought this would give me a slight bit of solace in not having to write about Rosemary because of some salient memory of her in the garden.

It was not to be. Hidden by many leaves was an almost open bloom of Rosa ‘Olivier Roellinger’. I wrote about this rose a few times as it was a posthumous gift from Rosemary that arrived at my front door in February 2021. I wrote about it in link below.

Beyond the grave 

Rosemary’s persistence in my life is a reason why the only comfort I have, in spite of her not being around, is the constant attention I get from Niño and Niña. And yet since Rosemary and I went to the SPCA they are not better than the rose to distract me from my solitude.

Once the roses are gone in late fall I will have to do the fall clean-up of the garden. She was the expert. She will be in my thoughts as I cut back the perennials an prune back some of my unremontant roses.

These days always in my mind are three women who by simple chance met each other. They are my mother, grandmother and Rosemary. It was my mother who adored Rosemary and that feeling was reciprocated. By the time Rosemary met my grandmother my abuelita had dementia.

Another wonderful occurrence is that Rosemary met my St. Edward’s High School mentor, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. in Austin a few years before he died. Who would have known that the man I first encountered in 1958 would face my Rosemary?

But then the ship, Río Aguapey that took me back from Buenos Aires after my military service to Mexico I found out years later that it had been built at the Burrard Shipyards.

My grandmother often told me the story of she, my mother, aunt and uncle moving from Manila in 1923 to the Bronx, “Alex, our Japanese ship dropped us off at a magical place with mountains and trees called Vancouver. We went to a cavernous train station [the one at the foot of Granville] and took a train to Montreal”.

Was it my fate to meet up with a Canadian woman in December 1967 and come to Vancouver in 1975?