Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 20 October 2025

 

Alex, I stumbled across this Williams Caarlos Williams quotation and thought of you, your garden and the role it played in your relationship with Rosemary:  "It's at the edge of a petal that love waits". I'm not at all convinced I know exactly what he was getting at, but I like it.

Yesterday I receive and email by my good friend Dominic Schaeffer. Today at the Sylvia Hotel we met with other 23 artists, writers, photographers, etc and I explained what the Williams quotation would mean to me.

Since the death of my Rosemary now, almost 5 years ago for a while the Kitsilano garden was our garden. Little by little I have slowly given that concept up and the garden is my garden.

There is a problem here which is melancholic and that it that my garden has many of her plants. Some I don’t know how to prune, etc.

Because she was Rosamaría/Rosemary and in 1991 she pressured me to go to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society I eventually became a rose enthusiast just like her. Her roses may be my roses now, but when I look at her roses her face is on them.

This morning wanted to show my Portland guest, Curtis Daily how my back lane garden English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ seems to be ignoring the coming winter and it has a few solitary blooms and buds that I know will never open. I showed Curtis the one that was open with a bud next to it. It was high on the bush so I used my secateurs and cut below on a branch. It fell to the ground and many of the petals fell out. I told Curtis that I was going to scan it as it was and there would be beauty in it.

A rose before it opens, that bud, that opening rose, that rose that begins to fade and lose it petals, they are all the essence that a rose is. I like to think that the edge, translated to borde (border in English) represents that transition from my very much alive Rosemary, which would be that open rose. As the rose deteriorates just like my Rosemary became very sick, that rose edge was that moment when it was on the rose. When it fell on the ground, the petals became my now gone Rosemary at the moment of her death.

The lovely rose scan now is that Rosemary before those 6 minutes before she died.

Lovely she was even then.