Rosa 'Westerland' 21 May 2023

My artistic isolation deepens as I live in an empty house because of a recent top to bottom flood. On Wednesday the restoration experts will be tearing down walls and making holes in ceilings. They will be removing floors.

The folks that took my furniture, etc, for storage rarely asked me about what to leave. Luckily I was wearing shoes as they took all my shoes that were at the entrance. My mugs were gone so I had to buy a large glass beer mug at a dollar store to make my tea.

I have idle time as I am an obsolete, redundant, retired & inconsequential magazine photographer awaiting my inevitable and statistically soon oblivion.

Meanwhile as my grandmother often told me, “When the devil is bored he swats flies with his tail.” In May I am in the absolute beginning (the best time) period of my scanning roses and other plants in my garden. I began this in the summer of 2001 and I have amassed over 3000 scans. What will happen to them when I am gone is of no consequence. What is important is that the scanning, which includes the arranging of the rose leaves (and picking nice leaves) is lots of fun. It is a distraction from my grief over Rosemary’s death on 9 December 2020. But the distraction is not always the right one. When I scan some of her favourite roses I think about her and I wish she were here to smell them and admire their colour and shape.

This is much the case with this orange rose, Rosa ‘Westerland’. For years Rosemary banned reds, yellows and oranges from our Kerrisdale garden. Westerland won her over particularly when I told her that its scent resembled my idea of synthetic apricot  jam. Best of all my scan of Westerland made the cover of Canadian Gardening and I believe it may have been the first time a scanned flower made it there.

Westerland, Apricot Jam and Canadian Gardening

In my large collection of rose scans this rose appears many times every year. Every time I see a bloom I am tempted. This scan represents the first bloom of Westerland.

I have scanned it twice. In the second scan I put some translucent plastic sheet over it to get the result that I especially like.

And, I am not going to persist in worrying about my isolation from this pleasant task of scanning roses without my Rosemary.