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| Rosa 'Bathsheba' 22 October 2024 |
Perfection – William Carlos Williams
O lovely apple!
beautifully and completely
rotten
hardly a contour marred--
perhaps a little
shrivelled at the top but that
aside perfect
in every detail! O lovely
apple! what a
deep and suffusing brown
mantles that
unspoiled surface! No one
has moved you
since I placed you on the porch
rail a month ago
to ripen.
No one. No one!
When my wife urged me forcefully that we were going to attend a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society at the Floral Hall of Van Dusen, sometime around 1990, I found myself sitting in an uncomfortable chair watching 100 bad projected close-up slides of roses. But Rosemary prevailed and I ended up being as interested as she in growing them.
To this day I have never participated in the annual rose show where they have rules(in my opinion onerous of the Victorian kind) on how to display roses in the rose show.
Recently they have started and awfully popular where we bring (and I participate) our roses to the meetings without any instructions on how to display them.
Today when I saw this English Rose, Rosa ‘Bathsheba’ I noticed that the bloom was not central but to one side. This rose would not have been accepted in that annual rose show.
It is getting cold and rainy so roses are on their last legs. To me this rose was beautiful. I scanned it, carefull to lean it so you can see the off-centre centre. I thought that in its own way it is perfect. I found William Carlos Williams’s poem about rotten apples fit the bill.
