Rosa 'Sexy Rexy' & Senecio candicans 'Angel Wings'  29 August 2024

When Rosemary and I started gardening in our large Kerrisdale corner garden in 1986, she was the gardener and I was the amateur. The garden had lots of shade. I looked up solutions and I kept reading about hostas.

Houses were being torn down all over our neighbourhood. Rosemary actively kept track. Once the house was to be demolished we would go in the late afternoon with our wheelbarrow and spades. In one garden Rosemary said, “That’s a hosta.” And that began my entry into gardening with that almost impossible-to-kill-plant.

In those early years Rosemary had her garden with many perennials, ferns and roses. I had my hostas. We would be annoyed when my hostas would creep in on her beds or her perennials into mine.

We soon discovered that the garden was our garden. It was at that point that I respected her amazing ability to find interesting plants.

Some of her faves where the gray plants, like the one in this scan.

Rosa ‘Sexy Rexy’ is now one of my faves since I replaced it after years of having disappeared from our garden.

I decided today that I would mate one of Rosemary’s fave plants and one of mine.

It is this sharing that was one of the key reasons we survived 52 years being married.

My cats, Niño and Niña and I, share those many moments that the four of us had in what almost seems it was not four years ago, but yesterday.

When the three of us are in the sunny deck, surrounded by what were our plants, I am certain that those two cats remember as well as I do.