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| Top - Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' & Rosa 'Winchester Cathedral' - & May 2025 |
John Boyle O'Reilly
1844 – 1890
The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
But I send you a cream-white rosebud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.
I remember going to public libraries and going through the card catalogues that often diverted me from what I was looking for to something much more wonderful.
In this century Google has surpassed the possibilities of those card catalogues although something the finding is less surprising.
Consider that today I had a squished Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ that was squished because I could not suspend it from my little bamboo stem so the rose would be not quite touching the glass (and not get squished by its own weight). Late afternoon I spotted a fully open bloom of the English Rose, Rosa ‘Winchester Cathedral.
And so I decided to scan them together. Then I went to Google and placed a white rose/poem. Luck was on my side, a sort of card catalogue kind of luck because that led me to a poem written by an Irish poet of the 19th century that was about a red and a white rose.
To my further surprise the pictures of John Boyle O’Reilly resemble the likeness of my Argentine nephew Georgito O’Reilly.