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| Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' and Aeonium - 23 October 2026 |
Poem 856 – Emily Dickinson
There is a finished feeling
Experienced at Graves—
A leisure of the Future—
A Wilderness of Size.
By Death's bold Exhibition
Preciser what we are
And the Eternal function
Enabled to infer.
One of my everyday routines in the growing season of my
garden and until fall is my daily scanning of the plants. I started in the
summer of 2001 and I may have at the very least 3000 of them. These scans I
associate somehow with my Rosemary, my life and with poems of my favourite
poets in English and in Spanish.
Today I saw that my Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ has yet to give
up the ghost. I have a plant, a succulent Aeonium that was given to me by a visitor
to my late spring open garden to the rose society. My old age is my only excuse
for not remembering me who gifted it to me.
I learned Latin in my Roman Catholic boarding school in
Austin in the late 50s so I like the sound of se finit.
At this time of the year I always think of Tsleil-Waututh
Chief Len George. When he showed me around the burial ground in North Vancouver
he told me that there was an idea that if you survived winter you would live
for another year. He died on December 7.
And it is only natural that apply his concept to myself.
Will I be around to see the first blooms of A Shropshire Lad next year?