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| Red roses from my garden - 14 August 2025 |
El curioso color del colorado - Jorge Luís Borges
Perhaps the most personal of all gifts is not a pair of boxer shorts from my Rosemary but a good book from a friend. Such is the case of this book that was given to me by Kerry McPhedran, Christmas 2005.
Recently I told her how I treasured the book and she had simply forgotten that she had given it to me.
The crux of the book is that in 16th century Mexico Spaniards discovered that by pressing a particular sow bug (cochinilla) that lived in a cactus the result was a brilliant red dye. This dye then became as valuable as the gold and silver that was shipped in galleons to Spain. The English, the French and the Dutch would forcibly board them to extract those three valuable commodities.
The book nicely reveals that the first artist to use the red dye was Titian.
Today I looked around my garden to look for that perfect red rose. Alas the only real one, Rosa ‘Emily Carr’ (bottom right) was a bit past its glory! Some of the others have a magenta cast.
I have written quite a few blogs where I mention the Jorge Luís Borges poem La lluvia (the rain) where he has a sentence about a read rose that according to my friend George McWhirter (the first Vancouver Poet Laureate) cannot be translated into English because English has no real synonym for red (carmine won’t do) as Spanish with its rojo/colorado.
el curioso color del colorado (link above to poem La lluvia)
As I look at all the books in my possession I note the personal connection I have to all of them. I remember with grief going to a used book store and seeing a book written by a friend and dedicated to another friend on the pile. That will be the eventual destiny of my books.
I will not mind. I will be dead.
