Rosa 'Susan Williams- Ellis' 2 October 2025

 

The White Rose - 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.

This English Rose, like many of my roses, reminds me of my Rosemary. She was gentle and tiny. Sometimes, in spite of her many strengths, I thought she was fragile. I would now correct that to – she was dainty and delicate.And strong.

Winter is almost upon us and I look at my waning garden wondering if I will be around next year for spring. There is some hope when a white, dainty and delicate rose blooms. It proves that I figured out my Rosemary correctly.

In 1951 my mother took me to see the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir with Rex Harrison, Gene Tierney, George Sanders and Natalie Wood as a child. Because I was 9, Harrison’s booming voice did not scare me. I loved the film and fell in love with Gene Tierney.

I saw the film again in Mexico with my mother and with my Rosemary. In Vancouver some years ago my daughter Hilary says we saw it together.

Obviously there is some memory and a consistent tradition with this film and my family. While I live alone with two cats since my Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 I am lucky to have two daughters. Alexandra who lives in remote Lillooet I don’t see too often, but my younger daughter Hilary who lives in Burnaby I see once a week.

Luckily (again!) she is a snob like her mother and her father. She likes to see good films, particularly the ones with little violence. And so it was that on Tuesday she screened The Ghost and Mrs. Muir on her TV after we had dinner. I brought the ravioli and she made the salad.

Somehow it was almost like we were seeing the film for the first time as we forgot some of the details. That made it even more fun.

We both noticed that the prominent portrait of Harrison on the film compares ever so nicely with the portrait of Gene Tierney in the 1944 film with Dana Andrews, Laura. Famously Dana Andrew’s character falls in love with Tierney by just seeing her portrait. He is told that she is dead. We know better!

Dana Andrews the ultimate film noir actor 

Hilary and I will be seeing Laura next. I will be bringing a Safeway barbecued chicken for dinner.

I fell in love with Tierney in 1951 and that emotion was not repeated until I saw my first Grace Kelly film, Rear Window, Eva Marie Saint in Raintree County and Audrey Hepburn, in Roman Holiday. To this day Eva Marie Saint must have been in my mind when I fell for my blonde Rosemary.

When Rosemary and I had a garden in Kerrisdale I purchased Rosa 'Sexy Rexy' as I thought it had been named after Rex Harrison. That was not the case. That rose grows in my Kitsilano garden. Guess who I think about when I see it in bloom?

Rosa 'Sexy Rexy' 

Thank you Hilary for the memories. 

Marc Destrubé & Alan Storey

Since journalism in Vancouver became moribund some years ago the promotion of cultural events has declined. Publicists as well as journalists are now obsolete.

There is one solution to this dilemma. It is to get on cultural (music, dance, theatre, art) email lists. I am in several. Two important ones involve the leader, violinist Marc Destrubé of  both the Microcosmos Quartet and La Modestine (named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s donkey on his trip through Europe).

Here are the web pages for those two groups.

 Microcosmos Quartet 

La Modestine

Upcoming Microcosmos House Concerts and Program

I will not be missing one of the house concerts (they repeat the same concert in various homes within a week or two. It is the Microcosmos Quartet playing in the house of multi-talented artist/architect/etc Alan Storey. I wrote about a previous one at his home here.

Before I ever went to a Micrcosmos Quartet concert I would not have been caught dead listening to Béla Bártok. I found his music dissonant and cold. That all changed when I watched the quartet’s four warm musicians (with smiles on their faces) play the Bártok Quartets.

Microcosmos Quartet & Béla Bártok

These concerts are not expensive and they involve food and drinks. In the case of Storey’s house it is filled with stuff you want to ask him about.

Story is not the only NOY one-trick pony. Marc Destrubé plays both the gut-stringed baroque violin but also the modern stringed instrument. He is a born teacher so at every concert you will learn something new. It was he who told me that the horse-hair used in a violin bow is from a male horse’s tail. It seems that female horses urinate on their tales and that makes their hair unusable. 

In a recent  La Modestine concert, organist/harpsichordist Marco Vitale told us a fact that amazed me. It seems that in a harpsichord when the keys are pressed the instrument's mechanism goes up but is unable to come down if there is no gravity. Vitale then added, "Harpsichords cannot be played on the moon."

And because Vancouver is a city with a poor memory for its past guess who designed and built the pendulum in the Pendulum Gallery?

Aconitum carmichaelli 'Arendsii' 1 October 2025

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty declares to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

With my roses waning I happily can still use my scanner thanks to some of the other plants like this hosta and the aconitum. Because Rosemary’s favourite colour in the garden was blue she planted lots of aconitum that that have the pleasant feature of blooming in the fall.

My friend, now gone, Wolfram George Schmid who wrote the best book on hostas gave me one tip which I am not aware most people might know. He said that if you put a yellow plant next to a blue one, both colours will be enhanced.

Yellow hostas like this one, Hosta ‘Midas Touch’ are sometimes called gold hostas. As the season progresses and particularly if they get sun they become albescence which is another term that Schmid taught me. Some hostas turn yellow from green. In that case they are lutescent.

I miss my Rosemary because she urged me to learn botanical nomenclature. There are few people, now that heavy duty gardening is in a decline, who are interested in it. How many know that roses do not have thorns but have prickles. 

There is something that few know about German-born Wolfram George Schmid. Before he retired to his garden in Atlanta he designed launching pad platforms for NASA. 

Rosa 'Sweet Juliet' and Hosta 'Forbidden Fruit' 30 September 2025

As I scanned at this rose and hosta leaf I came to the conclusion that spring represents to me hope, summer is happiness, fall is reflection and winter is death. Chief Len George told me years ago that the Indigenous Peoples believe that if you survive a winter you will live to see another year. I am keeping my hope.

Chief Len George & Winter 

This rose I do not believe will be the last one of the season. I just might get lucky. I was sad scanning it as whenever a season began Rosemary and I discussed its ramifications. We reflected on the season past and planned the season to come. Alone with two cats I can no longer do that. The changing of a season somehow becomes a lonely experience.

And of course, as I write this I am wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt. I might have to turn on my heater in my oficina.

 Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold - William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.