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| Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' 30 June 2026 |
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost – 1874 - 1963
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
In 1962 I
was going to an American college in Mexico City, Mexico City College. One of my
classes was presided by a man who had been a friend of poet Robert Frost, and
astoundingly he looked like the poet. I was much too ignorant (and stupid) to
appreciate his class so I sat in the back and yawned constantly.
It was only
after I started writing these blogs in 2006 that I started associating my photographs
and plant scans to poets and writers.
Today I saw
this bloom of Rosa ‘Susan Williams-Ellis’ (and English Rose). In all my years
of scanning roses (I may have at least 4000 plant scans) I was struck that this
bloom was perfection. It was perfection even if you note the centre is slightly
yellow and there is a tinge of red in one of the petals.
To make this
perfection even more of a Platonic essence, when I saw the scan on my new (but
used) 28 inch wide Acer monitor, it looked exactly like the rose itself.
I just wish
I could return to that unnamed English Literature professor whose name I long
forgot and tell him that I have found my way.