Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad''  & Peter Trower -  3 September 2026

With Rue My Heart is Laden – A Shropshire Lad - A.E. Housman With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

In the 80s and early 90s a group of us (writers, editors, photographers, artists,  poets, strippers, novelists, etc) would meet for lunch at the Railway Club every Thursday. Such was for me the importance of this gathering that I tried to avoid accepting free-lance jobs that would interfere.

We had four poets that often attended; they were Peter Trower, Gerry Gilbert, Evelyn Lau and Jamie Reid. Reid affirmed he was a member of the Canadian Communist Party.

Peter Trower was often called our Logging Poet. It was he who introduced me to A.E. Housman and particularly his A Shropshire Lad.

In my rose garden in today’s date, 3 September, 2026 only one rose is in bloom. It is in my back lane garden. It is an English Rose, thus it is remontant. This means that it blooms more than once. In many respects it is one of two or three of my best roses. It is fragrant and one of its lovely characteristics is that its new leaves are bright dark red.