Rosa 'Winchester Cathedral' & Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 26 June 2024

Red and White

by Carl Sandburg

Nobody picks a red rose when the winter wind

howls and the white snow blows among the fences and storm doors.

Nobody watches the dreamy sculptures of snow

when the summer roses blow red and soft in the garden yards and corners.

O I have loved red roses and O I have loved white snow—

dreamy drifts winter and summer—roses and snow.

In the years (since 2001) that I have been scanning plants and principally the roses of my garden I have wanted to find a justification by mating the scans with personal experience or by finding rreferences in poetry and in prose. I have written at least 100 blogs inspired by Emily Dickinson poems and almost as many by my favourite Argentine author, Jorge Luís Borges.

I am 81 and in this stage of my life I can assert that my knowledge of poetry is almost formidable.

Today I wanted to scan these two English Roses. The white one is Rosa ‘Winchester Cathedral’ and the red one Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’( an English Ballerina.

There is something to be said about the usefulness of search engines. I placed “the red and the white – poem’ and found this lovely poem. Now thanks to these two roses the poem is in my memory.

On 5 October 2022 I scanned these two roses.