Left - Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' - Right - Rosa 'Benjamin Britten' and bottom - Rosa 'Dr. Huey' 7 May 2025

Rosa 'Benjamin Britten' 7 May 2026

La Lluvia – Jorge Luís Borges

Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado

Porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.

Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa

Que sin duda sucede en el pasado.

Quien la oye caer ha recobrado

El tiempo en que la suerte venturosa

Le reveló una flor llamada rosa

Y el curioso color del colorado.

Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales

Alegrará en perdidos arrabales

Las negras uvas de una parra en cierto

Patio que ya no existe. La mojada

Tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,

De mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet". Spoken by Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Scene 2)

My Rosemary introduced me (almost gently) to her interest in roses. Her favourites were the red roses. Before she made me become a member of the Vancouver Rose Society I was one of those stupid men who would buy long stem red roses (that never had any scent) for her birthday. I soon learned about the old roses of other centuries and the David Austin’s English roses that looked like old roses.

Today these three red roses were in bloom. One of them I call an interloper with a will to live. Rosemary after we moved to Kitsilano would often go to our old Kerrisdale garden ( I never had the heart to go with her). One day she brought a red rose from our lane. I told her that we never had a red rose there. I explained that some rose we had planted there died but the root stock persevered. For many years roses were sold that were grafted to a sturdy stock called Rosa ‘Doctor Huey’.

'Dr. Huey' is a highly vigorous, dark red, semi-double climbing rose (Hybrid Wichurana) introduced in 1920, widely known as the primary rootstock for grafted roses in North America. It is notoriously prone to black spot and powdery mildew, blooms once in early spring, and frequently overtakes the grafted rose, leading to its reputation as a common, unintended garden resident. Wikipedia

I now consider this rose very special for its connection with my Rosemary.

The Borges poem is called The Rain and it has an impossible to translate line that is almost an alliterarion. It works because in Spanish we have two words for red (besides carmín) and they are rojo and colorado. In my native Argentina those of high society never use rojo but colorado. They say that rojo is “low class”.

Captain Beefheart - January 1981

When I studied philosophy for two years beginning in 1962 at Mexico City College with the professor Ramón Xirau I received a good ground in helping me able to think. Xirau told us that while the Pre-Socratic philosopher did write on parchment Socrates refused to write anything and only because of his student Plato do we know what his thoughts on the subject of philosophy were all about.

What that means to me is that those early philosophers, even those who wrote, spent a long time thinking. There were no distracting books.

I believe that there is something to be said to being on my bed with my two cats (bed rotting it is called) and staring at the ceiling and avoiding the pile of books that I should read.

Of late I have been thinking how we are able to think because we have language. Without it how did our ancestors think? But this language we have steers us into thought with the complexity of language as it is.

In the 1957 film Desk Set with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Hepburn plays Bunny Watson who works in what was probably the main public library in New York. She and cohorts answer the phone and point out the name of the seven dwarfs in Snow White. Tracy shows up with a computer and tells them that they will not have to answer the phone anymore. Someone then asks the computer on a topic of the English grammar and the computer cannot deal with the complexity and it explodes.

To my advantage I want to point out that I speak Argentine Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Anglo Argentine English, Texan English and finally Canadian English.

Does this give me an advantage in my bed rotting?  

All the above has led me to lately wonder why it is that I keep staring of photographs I took of my Rosemary when we met and first got married and not so much of her in a few years before she died. Here I think of the writings of Jorge Luís Borges who stated that first times are infinitely followed by the same first times over and over until oblivion sets in. Because so many of my friends, relatives and people I worked with our dead, their faces parade in my mind as young persons when I first met them. I see my mother and father as if I were 5 or 6. I see my mentor abuelita in her prime not when she came back from visiting my uncle in Egypt. She looked at me and there was nobody home.

When I stare at a photograph of my Rosemary on the opposite wall from my bed, I can imagine getting ready to press on the shutter button all over again. I can hear the mechanical shutter of the Asahi Pentax S-3 I used.  I can see myself putting the roll of Tri-X into a Nikkor tank and mixing the Kodak HC-100 developer.

I cannot go on and I will not do so without quoting Captain Beefheart’s lyric from his 1972 song Ashtray Heart:

Somebody’s had too much to think

Filomena Cristeta de Irureta Goyena Waterhouse-Hayward & Rosa 'Benjamin Britten' scanned 5 May 2026

With most of my friends, family and people I worked with (here in Vancouver) mostly all dead, their faces crop up in my memory randomly.

It was a few weeks ago that it dawned on me that I had many framed portraits of my family but only one, a little on of my mother where she is with my Rosemary and baby Alexandra in Veracruz. I remember driving with Rosemary and Alexandra in our VW to Veracruz so my mother would see how the newborn had grown. On the way I took a curve much too quickly and we turned over. Rosemary and I survived it well because we had installed some new-fangled shoulder seat belts. Alexandra was inside a wicker basket that had a hood so she was fine, too. A couple stopped and the man offered to drive our Beetle (it was drive-able once we had its wheels on the ground to Veracruz and his wife took us in her car.

Veracruz - 1969

I decided to set the record straight. Alexandra (we call her Ale, pronounced ahleh) recently gave me a lovely antique frame. I printed a picture of my mother to fit and carefully cut it to fit the oval frame.

It is difficult for me to explain the difference in seeing a framed picture on a wall as compared to scanning the portrait of my mother. While it was taken for some school annual when I enlarge it in my monitor there is a form of intimacy that happens.

Because my father was of English heritage (his father had been born in Manchester) I was often told of it. My mother and father took me to the Teatro Colón sometime around 1949 where I first heard Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra Op. 34.

When I spotted a yet unopened English Rose, Rosa ‘Benjamin Britten’ and noticed how lovely it looked I decided to combine it with my newly framed photograph of my mother.

And as I have often repeated in these parts, in the Veracruz photo I can imagine (as they are not well seen) how both my mother and Rosemary had beautiful legs.

I inherited my mother’s. 

P.S. I was one of the few who knew my mother's second name Cristeta. She hated it. I regret that I was never curious enough to know who gave it to her. 

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 8 May 2026

Poem The Rose is Absolete -below
 

My grandmother often told me “la ignorancia is atrevida” or ignorance is daring. In my many years (83) of existence I keep making my abuelita right.

In 1962 I was going to an American college (Mexico City College). One of the most boring classes (I was an idiot) was an oldish white-haired English professor who looked like Robert Frost and because he was his friend would tell us stories about him. I sat in the back row and yawned.

I had a good reason for my yawning as a friend, Roberto Hijar was studying art and he persuaded me to accompany him to the college darkroom from late evenings to early mornings. Robert taught me to develop film and to print it. He was most influential in making me a photographer.

When I started writing these blogs (6900 of them not including this one) in 2006 I had to find ways of placing my photographs (and later my plant scans) in them. That is when I discovered that they went just fine with poetry. I have written over 150 blogs related to Emily Dickinson, at least 100 related to Jorge Luís Borges and many more poets.

What this means is that later in my life I have become good in being able to tell people of my favourite poets.

If anything it proves that it is never too late to become cultured. One important event in that topic is that before 1991 I only read in English. A year later I went to Lima, Peru to interview and photograph Mario Vargas Llosa. I decided to read his complete output before taking my plane. I took out all his books from the UBC Library and somehow my reading Spanish returned. To this day I read at least one poem or story by Borges every night to stay in shape.

Because many blogs with poems,like this one, are connected to my plant scans I have to thank the influence of my wife Rosemary (she died 9 December, 2020) in  gently making me a gardener and then a member of the Vancouver Rose Society in 2001.

While I scanned the rose today Friday 8 May I am placing it on an early date to fill a blog hole. 

 The Rose is Obsolete - William Carlos Williams 1923

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses--

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

Rosa 'Zepherine Drouhin' -  3 May 2026

My Rosemary taught me early on in our gardening to be BC or botanically correct. The rose I scanned today is called Rosa ‘Zepherine Drouhin’. In proper botanical nomenclature the species name is capitalized and italicized. The cultivar name is placed between single quotes.

Those who do not know would say that this rose is probably the last one in the catalogues as the name begins with a z. They may add that it is one of the few roses that does not have thorns. Unfortunately that person would be wrong in the second opinion as roses have prickles and not thorns.

In Spanish a thorn is an espina but in proper Spanish botanical nomenclature Zepherine Drouhin has aguijones.

It could be that my Kitsilano deck is warmer than in other parts of the city as I have many roses in bloom right now when they usually bloom in June.

I used to have a lovely Hosta 'Zounds' which was the last in all hosta catalogues. Here with Rebecca in our old Kerrisdale garden on the right is Zounds. Somehow when we moved to Kitsilano it disappeared.