English Rose Rosa 'Leander', June 7 2016

Wikipedia - Hero and Leander

Living in a house for 30 years and then having to move out to a smaller place involves a variation on packing your bags. Not everything fits so you have to sort, throw out and give away.

In our stay in our house on Athlone Street I collected stuff not realizing that someday my life might be reduced to having my name on a bench at UBC Botanical Garden (or elsewhere where it might be cheaper).

A last the moment a flooded basement helped me with my records. As the water was gaining ground I separated my records. Then I drove a couple of blocks with a trunkful of the stuff, stood on a stepladder and threw it into one of the many bins in my area which I call Slow Dresden.

The books(I had 4000) was a tough job. Luckily Don Stewart at Macleod Books accepted about 200 of them. Many others, including a softcover collection of Anton Chekhov short stories, went flying into those bins. Nobody wanted my books and I found it more stressful to find a home than to “dumpomatic” them.

Toughest of all were our plants. The big trees had to stay and most will be plowed over. I had to select from my 85 Old Roses, tea roses, Albas, English Roses, Gallicas and Hybrid Perpetuals, 20. Some, Mary a friend of my Rosemary took to her garden. A woman from the Vancouver Rose Society that Rosemary called told her (when she was warned that I was much too tired to dig any out)  that we should leave it to others who were already coming (but few came). I was able to convince Douglas Justice at the UBC Botanical Garden to take dig out and and take away my huge English Rose Rosa ‘Wild Edric’ and the banana scented Rosa ‘Dupontii’.

Four of the roses that are now doing just fine in our new garden were originally suggested by former head of the Vancouver Rose Society, Janet Wood. These are Rosa ‘Fair Bianca’, Rosa ‘Jacqueline Dupré’, Rosa ‘Emily Louise’ and Rosa ‘Leander’. Two, Fair Bianca and Leander are English Roses. The former (white), smells of luscious myrrh. Leander smells of ripe fruit. Leander is a shade tolerant (tall it is to get to light) rose that is growing on the shady side of our house were we have some of the ferns we brought with us.

Sometimes it breaks my heart to snip a beautiful display as I have today with these 3 blooms of Leander and one bud. A forth one lost all its petals as it was the first to bloom.  Perhaps it is worth the snip just to show anybody who might get this far to appreciate how roses seem to accommodate to new places and will keep giving pleasure to we who think are the owners. Sometimes I suspect that roses are like cats and like cats they do the owning.

And from my Wikipedia

Hero and Leander – Christopher Marlowe – 1568

Marlowe's poem relates the Greek legend of Hero and Leander, young lovers living in cities on opposite sides of the Hellespont, a narrow stretch of the sea in what is now northwestern Turkey, and which separates Europe and Asia. Hero is a priestess or devotee of Venus (goddess of love and beauty) in Sestos, who lives in chastity despite being devoted to the goddess of love. At a festival in honour of her deity, Venus and Adonis, she is seen by Leander, a youth from Abydos on the opposite side of the Hellespont. Leander falls in love with her, and she reciprocates, although cautiously, as she has made a vow of chastity to Venus.

Leander convinces her to abandon her fears. Hero lives in a high tower overlooking the water; he asks her to light a lamp in her window, and he promises to swim the Hellespont each night to be with her. She complies. On his first night's swim, Leander is spotted by Neptune (Roman god of the sea), who confuses him with Ganymede and carries him to the bottom of the ocean. Discovering his mistake, the god returns him to shore with a bracelet supposed to keep him safe from drowning. Leander emerges from the Hellespont, finds Hero's tower and knocks on the door, which Hero then opens to find him standing stark naked. She lets him "whisper in her ear, / Flatter, entreat, promise, protest, and swear," and after a series of coy, half-hearted attempts to "defend the fort" she yields to bliss. The poem breaks off as dawn is breaking.

No critical consensus exists on the issue of how Marlowe, had he lived, would have finished the poem, or indeed if he would have finished it at all.