"You should have seen them a couple of weeks ago!"

To be heard in any Vancouver Rose Society open garden

Roses, cats and babies have something important in common. They rarely perform on demand. They have their own personal priorities.

Our tiny Kits garden will be open for the Vancouver Rose Society in a couple of weeks and the roses are blooming gangbusters right now. Rosemary is upset and keeps telling me we should have opened it in the first days of June.

I do believe that between my hostas and Rosemary’s perennials there are more than roses in our garden. But telling Rosemary this does not help.

Looking at my very large Rosa ‘Complicata’, James Mason, Sweet Juliet and Maiden’s Blush I am most aware that roses have to be pruned severely to keep them in check. In case of Maiden’s Blush and Sweet Juliet they are very tall and the blooms are much too high to smell the sweet scent of the roses “up there”.

Many years ago I photographed the concert of an English pop musician called Nick Lowe whose extremely hummable Cruel to be Kind struck me as the song one should have in one’s mind while pruning roses! 

My about-to-be-17 granddaughter Lauren has been dancing at the Arts Umbrella Dance Company since she was 7. Alas! She is giving dance up and is going to concentrate on working over the summer and concentrating on her clarinet playing. My Rosemary and I are understandably shocked. But as grandparents, little by little we are learning to withdraw and understand that a teenager should decide on the forthcoming future and what to do with it.

These pictures I took a couple of weeks ago at the Arts Umbrella studio on West 7^th Avenue.

I have been taking photographs at rehearsals, back stage and of performances of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company for quite a few years. Working for magazines and particularly for the Georgia Straight gave the needed credentials to take photographs and to experiment with slow shutter blurs or getting the personality of individual dancers on film or digitally. With Lauren no longer at that institution it would seem that any purpose I may still hold for going to photograph performances is gone.

I look at that and these photographs with melancholy but I am understanding (or so I say to myself) that at age 77 I have to let go.

There will be two more performances of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company in two weeks that will have my Lauren in the ranks. I will take pictures. And then no more.

In passing I must congratulate Lauren for having persisted for so long. Dance will somehow be in her blood and she will have inherited a poise and grace that will serve her well in whatever it is she does with her life henceforth. 

Ever since Rosemary and I returned from Italy (now two months) I have been in a blog rut. I keep postponing. And then I note that I may be missing about a month’s worth. Is this the beginning of my gradual decline into not writing blogs at all? I have noticed that my old blogs have long and detailed content. Of late the content is next to nothing,

I may have one lame excuse. May/June is the season when roses begin to bloom. After breakfast  I run out into our deck to see what surprises are in store for me.

Today the surprise (and I must add that it has been dependable with me for at least 25 years) is the English Rose Rosa ‘Abraham Darby’ named after a 18^th century Englishman who discovered that when coal was heated in an oven without oxygen it made something called coke. When combined with iron ore it made good hard ore. Later coke was used to transform iron into the even stronger steel.

Shropshire’s Abraham Darby gave us Iron Bridge and then the building of English railroads and all that ushered in the industrial revolution.

That a plant, specifically a rose (unlike lupines for example) can carry al that into what is a five inch wide and extremely fragrant blossom perhaps gives me license to do nothing for the next while.