Rosa 'Brother Cadfael', June 20 2018

Much of what I do these days is to visit my past while awake. In my sleep that past is a strange one, sometimes scary, almost an alien one. When I wake up during the night I must tell myself that it is only a dream and that my present, my wake time present is just fine.

Of late my Rosemary has re-kindled her interest in roses. She spends hours in bed with her iPhone looking at rose websites.

There is a rose that is in bloom right now. It is an unusual English Rose called Rosa ‘Brother Cadfael’. It is unusual in that the blooms before they open they resemble a hybrid tea. They are unusually large.

Brother Cadfael succumbed in our old Kerrisdale garden as it could not cope with shade.

Rosemary was not eager to order the rose again thinking she might offend me. I took a scan print of the rose to my mentor in Austin, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. some years ago. Months later I visited him again. Behind him framed (he made the frame) was my print. On the bottom part of the frame he had inscribed a brass plaque with the name of the rose and that I had given it to him.

I told Rosemary that ordering the rose would not in the least offend me.

You see that at my age one of the ways of reliving my past is to be reminded by its tangible elements. The rose in bloom now reminds me of Brother Edwin and all of the novels (I read most of them) by Ellis Peters featuring her medieval sleuth.

What is most symmetrically proper is that the rose (sold by David Austin Roses) came via their North American distribution place which is Tyler, Texas. It arrived safe and sound in a box that was there, one morning, at our front door, two months ago.