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| Rosa 'Darcy Bussell' 29 August 2024 |
When my father and mother moved to a house with a long garden in the Buenos Aires suburb of Cohglan in 1947, I was five. Within a couple of years my mother would invite my school friends and cousins to my birthday on August 31. By this date it is spring in Buenos Aires. She had the party in the garden and insisted on a Mexican piñata and putting a tale on the donkey.
I remember 1950, as my nephew (a year younger) Georgito O’Reilly, showed up and he broke all my gift toys. Since then we have been inseparable friends.
There was one additional problem with my birthday in that on the 30th of August, Argentines celebrate the first Catholic saint of the Americas, St. Rose of Lima. On that 30 there is a famous (to this day) La Tormenta de Santa Rosa, or the Santa Rosa Storm. That meant that celebrating my birthday on the 31st could be a problem.
Today as I was walking in the garden, I noticed this perfect red rose. No matter how accurate my scan is it does not do justice to its three-dimensional presence. I knew I had to scan it, nonetheless.
While other perennials or trees may have lovely flowers, including the white flower of a Magnolia grandiflora, nothing can compare to the presence of a perfect rose.
Plato famously wrote that we humans can never perceive perfection, a perfection of what he called his world of ideas. We see a filtered form of reality.
If Plato were around I would challenge him, as undoubtedly
he never saw a red rose like mine. And I am glad to report that it promises to be sunny on my birthday.
