Roses

I suddenly have a craving for pink roses, I have no idea why.  Just pink ones, no other colour will do.  It's not true that I've always loved roses, it just came on suddenly this week.  They're nice enough flowers but that's all I usually feel for them.

Rosa centifolia from Les Roses (1817) (Country Garden Roses)

My grandmother did love roses and worked hard at growing them in a climate that was not really suitable for them. 

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I suppose there is a narrative in which I do love roses and always have, but it's a story someone else might tell about me, not one I would say is true of myself:  When I was a little kid, my grandmother had a cabbage rose bush. 

Unidentified pink cabbage rose (source).

I remember scooping petals up off the lawn and putting them in a shoebox.  I think I also put my grama's Siamese cat in the box and then piled rose petals on top - picture the cat hunkering down like grumpy cat.  I filled my orange plastic pumpkin from Halloween which I used as a handbag with petals and took them home, spending the long car trip up the island ruffling the petals and putting my face into the pumpkin to smell them. 

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn

Should never crave the rose.”

― Anne Bronte

David Austin rose 'Spirit of Freedom' (source)

I was five or six and roses didn't grow where we lived.  It was too cold and wet.  Petunias didn't grow there either, they melted.  Not much besides fir trees and ferns grew.  Maybe that's why I love tropical plants and now suddenly roses so much - as much as it's possible to find a reason. 

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”

― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques  

(source)

My grandmother had a huge stack of Herb Digest or something like that which I read through in her bathroom when I was in elementary school.  I read about monastery gardens and medieval herbal medicine and nuns.  I tried making rosary beads - despite not being Christian.  I was a complete heathen, never baptised or christened or confirmed or churched, but I have always liked ritual.  The burgundy and green carpets and incense and calligraphy and salaah five times a day and tasbeeh are some of the things I like about being Muslim, although they're trappings.  They're not the heart of the religion.

I chopped up rose petals and mixed them into a flour dough and rolled them into balls and painstakingly poked holes through them and laid them in the weak summer sun and turned them several times a day.  I eventually ended up with a string of crude musty-smelling brown beads.  I sometimes think about trying to do that again, now that I'm not ten years old and could produce something of better quality, if I had rose petals.

“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? 

Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet.  

Funny, it seems to by keeping it's dreams; it learned to breathe fresh air.  

Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.”

― Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete

Iskwew's Images

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 odour which doth in it live.

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly

When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:

But, for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth. 

 - Shakespeare's Sonnet 54

source

 I don't even like the roses that much in person, and I wouldn't want to have to grow them, but I like the idea of them and I like looking at pictures of them.

Merchant, keep your attar of roses,
your ambers, your oud,
your myrrh and sandalwood. I need
nothing but this dust
palmed in my hand’s cup
like a coin, like a mustard seed,
like a rusted key.

I need

no more than this, this earth

that isn’t earth, but breath,

the exhalation of a living city, the song

of a flute-boned woman,

air and marrow on her lips.

 - Amal el-Mohtar, 'Song for an Ancient City.'

Springtime in Istanbul

Artifacts from the ruins of an ancient church dating to the fifth century AD, found under the edge of the Hagia Sophia. It became a masjid after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, but before that it was the site of a series of churches beginning in the fourth century AD. These ruins were not fully excavated, to avoid damaging the Hagia Sophia.

Turkey, and Istanbul especially, have been famous for their tulips for centuries. We were fortunate to be in Istanbul during their brief season, and saw pretty much every sort of tulip imaginable. I photographed these pink ones in a park along the outside of the old city walls, the same walls that Fatih Sultan Mehmet led the Ottoman forces through over six hundred years ago. A little further along, people were growing vegetables under the wall, and it looked like some people were squatting in the trees between the wall and the road, and in some of the disintegrating towers as well. I spotted a young couple necking inside a tower that had crumbled down to only about a storey high.

I was fascinated by the city walls, and took a ton of pictures of them, one of the great things about being allowed to use Rukiye’s digital camera. I can take twenty pictures of something without worrying about wasting a whole roll of film; some of them will turn out, and some of them won’t, but that’s okay. Using a film camera is very expensive here, especially since mine uses unusual film and batteries, it's hard for me to communicate what I want at the studios, and the studios often mess up the prints. I took about half a dozen pictures of Rukiye’s lace curtains, and Rukiye decided I was officially nuts. In a week and a half, we took over six hundred pictures.

Rapunzel growing in the warmth and shelter of the stone wall.

Winter in Amman

It's strange to hear people in Canada talking about Christmas and snow, while we have dates and olives ripening, flowers opening, and clear blue skies here. It's sort of a combination of spring and fall right now. The leaves on the grape vines are turning yellow and rust-coloured and falling into crunchy brown piles in the corners of the courtyards, the big hand-shaped fig leaves are wilting slightly and their verdant green beginning to leach away, and the nights are getting colder. Along the roadside, the top halves of the silver green olive trees are dotted with black fruit, the lemons are turning from green to yellow, and the orange trees are loaded with brilliantly coloured globes. A glance down shows parchment white narcissus budding, rose bushes covered in coppery emerald new shoots, and pink cyclamen flowers rearing up like fireworks among the fallen leaves.

When it started to rain in October, everything green was roused out of dormancy. The city is dotted with plowed fields tucked in between buildings and roads, sparsely skimmed with the pale green of new grass shoots. We have a lush patch of edible greens, mint, and thistles which appeared miraculously a month ago out of the previously dry, cracked, bare ground by our door.




These cyclamen are actually pinker than they appear here, my webcam does not deal well with daylight. They are native to Jordan, and sprout up all around the edges of our yard. For some reason, the kids don't stomp them like they do the narcissus.

I have no idea what this one is, but it does smell nice. (Edit: it's an eskeddunya tree)

The first image below is bougainvillea climbing an olive tree next to our gate. My roommate's mother calls it 'crazy flower,' but we don't water ours, so it doesn't get too crazy. I see it billowing over the walls of the rich people, who can afford to water theirs. The second is a photo I did not take, showing the actual colour. My webcam bleaches everything.