Alex Waterhouse-Hayward: A Slash of Blue


Rhododendron augustinii 'Marion MacDonnell' - 17 April 2025

Blue was my Rosemary’s favourite colour in the garden. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that blue is a difficult colour to find there.

My friend Alleyne Cook selected a Rhododenron augustinii that he thought had blue flowers. It is called Rhododenron augustinii ‘Marion MacDonnell’. None of us ever thought it was really blue. It was purple. He gave me a plant which in my Kitsilano garden is now a small tree. This year the flowers are almost blue. I smiled. While both my Rosemary and Alleyne are gone they would have told me, “Alex, I told you so.”

Alleyne Cook

For me blue is colour that reminds me of my blue winter uniform when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy. Blue also brings me a memory touched with melancholy. In Buenos Aires, while in the navy, I had a lovely girl friend called Susy. One day she me and told me, “Alex you are never going to amount to anything and you have no culture. Don’t ever call me back. I am leaving you for a violinist in the Teatro Colón Symphony Orchestra.” I was living alone in a pension in the middle of a dark, cold and rainy Buenos Aires winter. I was depressed. I played the Miles Davis Kind of Blue album (which is the one I have kept all these years and is in this scan) endlessly somehow thinking that the more I got depressed the better it got.

In some way my Rosemary, like her colour blue, was a cool woman. She kept her thoughts to herself. But when she smiled she was all warmth. I never did tell her the significance of this album that has not a scratch and I could play it. I will not. I would rather wake up tomorrow and look out of the window. Rhododendron augustinii ‘Marion MacDonnell’ will be blue. It will remind me this Emily Dickinson Poem when I wake up tomorrow:

A slash of Blue - Emily Dickinson

204

A slash of Blue —

A sweep of Gray —

Some scarlet patches on the way,

Compose an Evening Sky —

A little purple — slipped between —

Some Ruby Trousers hurried on —

A Wave of Gold —

A Bank of Day —

This just makes out the Morning Sky.

More Emily Dickinson blogs

For I - inhabit Her

In Ceaseless Rosemary

The Morns are meeker

A Favourite Just Noticed

All the Witchcraft that we need

It only gives our wish for blue

My heart is laden

Of bronze and blaze

The red and the white

A Lady Red

Hands

I took my power in my hands

That clarifies the sight

Nature rarer uses yellow

Rosemary white and a bit of yellow

Nature rarer uses yellow

Luck is not chance

T is iris sir

The white heat

I tried to be a rose

nature rarer uses yellow

The Tulip

Nor would I be a poet

November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf

We turn not older with years, but older

Now I am ready to go
Dilapidation's processes Are organized Decays

I find my feet have further goals

A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue

The colour of the grave is green

Its temple stands, alway,

The Woman in white

Her Grace is not all she has

To know if any human eyes were near
Linda Melsted - the music of the violin does not emerge alone
The Charm invests her face
A sepal, a petal and a thorn
The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman
T were blessed to have seen
There is no frigate like a book
I pay in satin cash

Emily Dickinson's White Dress & a Hunter of Lost Souls