Peter Trower and Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 30 July 2025

 When I am dead and gone

With rue my heart is laden – A.E. Housman

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

When today I saw 8 open and 2 buds of my English Rose Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ I had an idea. I have mentioned before how my now gone poet friend Peter Trower introduced me to his fave UK writer A.E. Housman. He would quote to me passages from several poems in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.

 I cannot look at the blooms of this rose without hearing Trower’s voice or seeing his kind smile.

The idea that came to me was to scan the roses with one of my printed portraits of Trower. Unfortunately I have been printing lots and my inkjet paper box was empty. What was I to do?

The problem was resolved nicely by my printing an inkjet portrait on inkjet transparency.

Voilá here is the result!

Rosa 'Thomas à Becket' 30 July 2025

It was on a uncomfortable chair of VanDusen’s Flower Hall when my Rosemary in 1991 strongly pushed me to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. I told my Rosemary, “Why have you brought me here to watch 100 terrible close-ups of Roses.” In the end she was right and I adopted her passion for roses although I vowed never to photograph roses except within an area of our large Kerrisdale garden.

By 2002 I had devised by a stroke of a hot summer boredom to scan my roses and plants from our garden. By now I may have amassed at least 3000 scans.

Because I not only had a pushy (but good natured Rosemary) and two pushy (and not so good natured magazine art directors called Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl) I learned to listen when I didn’t want to listen. These three were always in immediate retrospective completely right.

Had I brought those two Vancouver Magazine art directors tight macro photographs of roses they would have told me, “Alex go out and try it again in a different way.”

Without wanting to offend those macro enthusiasts I want to gently explain why I do not like those macro shots of roses. Because I am a portrait photographer I believe that my roses have the faces of the people who named them, hybridized them, or the face of my Rosemary who loved them. When I shoot portraits I almost never get really tight. I like to show hands. I believe that roses have hands and those hands are their leaves. When I scan my roses I carefully choose the right leaves and display them as accurately and artistically I can.

Many of these photographers who macro-photograph roses, usually do not have them in their garden. They rarely try to find out the name of the rose or its history.

The scan today is close as I can get sans macro lens on a camera in trying to illustrate my point of isolating a rose and thus removing its essential personality.  

Hosta 'Paul's Glory' & Rosa 'Bosobel' - 30 July 2025

I often write here that when I started scanning the plants from our garden in 2002 my purpose was accuracy. I was careful with colour and I would scan the plants at 100% size and record the date.

Since then I have become artsy. I now like to scan plants with their companions and of late showing the beauty, particularly of my roses, when they are past their prime. I see beauty in aging.

Today July 30^th I am posting this blog in a hole a few days past. The hosta in question is a lovely Hosta ‘Paul’s Glory’ It is huge in a pot. I brought it from a hosta convention in Columbus, Ohio wrapped in wet newspaper in my luggage. I would not attempt anything like that now. The rose, Rosa ‘Bosobel’ in and English Rose that I have included here as it is at the peak of perfection.

I like the combination of the two.

To An Old Poet - Jorge Luis Borges

You walk the Castilian countryside

and see nothing. An intricate

verse from John’s Gospel

fills your mind

so you hardly mark the yellow

sunset. The hazy light raves

and at the limits of the East

the scornful, scarlet moon appears,

mirror of rage.

A Un Viejo Poeta 

Caminas por el campo de Castilla

y casi no lo ves. Un intrincado

versículo de Juan es tu cuidado

y apenas reparaste en la amarilla

puesta del sol. La vaga luz delira

y en el confín del Este se dilata

esa luna de escarnio y de escarlata

que es acaso el espejo de la Ira.

Alzas los ojos y la miras. Una

memoria de algo que fue tuyo empieza

y se apaga. La pálida cabeza

bajas y sigues caminando triste,

sin recordar el verso que escribiste:

Y su epitafio la sangrienta luna.