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| Rosa 'Baron Girod de L'Ain' & Rosa 'Gabriel Oak' 23 June 2026 |
O, how much more doth beauty
beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth
doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it
deem
For that sweet odor which doth in it
live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a
dye
As the perfumèd tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as
wantonly
When summer’s breath their maskèd
buds discloses;
But, for their virtue only is their
show,
They live unwooed and unrespected
fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not
so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest
odors made.
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, by verse distils your
truth.
William
Shakespeare – Sonnet 54
It is
amazing to me how some roses can be over-the-top flashy and others subtle. One
of the roses, here The Baron, has this barely noticeable white edge at the end
of the petals. The other Gabriel Oak is awfully flashy.
Whenever I
see a red rose I remember in Spanish
the Gorge Luis Borges La lluvia.
I must note here than in Spanish the title of books and poems will begin in a
capital letter but then no more. In La lluvia (The Rain) he writes “la rosa,
el curioso color del colorado.” It is almost a complete alliteration because in Spanish we
have colorado as a synonym for rojo.
Thanks to my
Rosemary, who gently forced me to attend a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society
in 1991 and my beginning to scan roses in 2001, I had to find an excuse to put
the scans in my blogs. This I did by writing of their connection to literature.
I have in all those years been exposed to many a poem that resides in my memory.