Except My Roses

Posted on June 21, 2013 by composerinthegarden

You steal my roses, the things I love most in all the world. . . You could have taken anything – except my roses. ~ from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast

A perfect first day of summer, the solstice, the longest day of the year. The roses are celebrating, having a raucous party in the garden while they soak up the sun and feed the bees. The height of rose bloom always brings to mind one of my favorite movies, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 masterpiece “Beauty and the Beast” (La Belle et la Bête). In a magical film that still delights and intrigues me with its whimsical imagery and cinematic beauty, the scene that comes to mind is when Beauty’s hapless father plucks a rose from the Beast’s garden as a gift for his daughter and is immediately confronted for his crime.

How ironic that I moved here twelve years ago so that I would have more gardening space for roses, and all of the roses I planted the first year died over the winter. The daylilies that I brought thrived in the heavy clay soil and shrugged off deer and rabbit attacks. Not so the lovely English roses, who were far too genteel to survive this robust and challenging garden microclimate. To be without roses was unthinkable, so I began a long experimentation with roses safely ensconced behind garden walls – who was sassy enough to survive in an organic garden with no spraying and no artificial fertilizer?

Old roses, a few of the hardier English roses on their own roots, stalwart Griffith Buck roses, a few Canadian and shrub roses – all became part of the garden landscape, surrounded by geraniums, lambs ear, and other gentle plant companions. The summer sun triggers the rose perfume; each morning begins with thousands of petals of color, heady fragrance, and the songs of bees nestling in for a little more pollen. You could take anything from me- except my roses.

Knockout Rose

Carefree Delight

Pink Carpet rose

Mary Rose (English)

Veilchenblau (old climbing rose)

Darlow’s Enigma hybrid musk rose

Darlow’s Enigma blossom

Rose de Rescht (old rose)

Rose de Rescht in border

Blanc Double de Coubert (rugosa)

Blushing Knockout and lamb’s ear

Blushing Knockout in the garden

‘Amber’ Carpet rose and blue geraniums

Margo Koster polyantha rose

Marie Pavie polyantha rose

Remastered and released by Criterion, La Belle et La Bête is now available on DVD and Blueray. (B&W, in French with English subtitles) A film treasure.

I buy most of my “own root” roses from Roses Unlimited, they are shipped in pots in beautiful condition. Wonderful source!

Let the Rain Kiss You

Posted on June 7, 2013 by composerinthegarden

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. ~ Langston Hughes, American poet

The garden glistened this morning with a thousand silver liquid drops of rain, lingering from yesterday’s storms. I’ve been absent of late, preoccupied with finishing a large music piece due in July and with testing and refining my video techniques for the Penn’s Woods project.

This morning, I gave myself a ramble about the garden to capture the sudden wealth of beautiful scenes of raindrops on leaf and bloom. I have been trying to develop a cinematic approach in capturing video, using selective focus (depth of field) and composing images using a spiral Fibonacci curve. Today, I challenged myself to shoot still photos the same way, using one lens (60 mm macro) and publishing only those photos that needed no cropping and minimal technical prep. Here are a few images of the garden in a magical moment and hopefully a reflection of my current goals in capturing images. Click on any photo to trigger the gallery view. Enjoy! (All photos ©2013 Lynn Emberg Purse, All Rights Reserved)

Kiss me with rain in your eyelashes,
come on, let us sway together,
under the trees, and to hell with thunder.
~Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet

We Must Be Mad With Joy

Posted on May 24, 2013 by composerinthegarden

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” ~Iris Murdoch, Irish author

Garden after rain

The thunderstorms passed by quickly, leaving a few large drops of rain in their wake and some empty threats of weather violence. We have fared far better than our neighbors in the American West, those unfortunate victims of extreme tornados who still struggle to recover their lives. Even as I grieve for them, I celebrate my own small corner of land in the foothills of western Pennsylvania.

Tonight, the garden in twilight is luxuriating in its richness of leaf and flower and I cannot end my stroll. It is bewitching. Leaves of every shape and form spring out and blend – all of the plants in my garden touch and jostle each other – no Puritan “touch me not” unplanted spaces here! Oh, this is an excess of green and growing that sings a great chorus in the dusk of a warm early summer day. Yes, many plants bloom in May – the insignia of iris, the globes of allium, the stars of clematis, the blooms of columbine, lilac and others. But May is feckless in its headlong plunge into green growth from the carpet beneath one’s feet to the canopy among the trees. May is fragrant and headstrong, the vibrant green path leading and spilling us into June.

Lamb’s ear rising up to bloom

The silver lamb’s ear have risen to a foot high impossibility in the past few days, ready to bloom and nourish the bees –their bright foliage outlines the beds in the garden. The swords of daylily leaves create circular swirls of green blades, predicting their July bloom – a promise of color and form to come. Beauty bush and lilac burst with thousands of tiny flowers, mounds of color and scent that greet the morning and bless the warmth of the evening, alive with the buzzing of bees seeking nectar. And so it goes. May is so full of voluptuous beauty and scented flowers that it sends the senses reeling with the experience of it, making us mad with joy.

Wild black cherry (Prunus serotina)

The surrounding woods are filled with the blooms of native black cherry, dangling white racemes that scent the air with their sweetness. Every day, a dozen new flowers awake and open and bring a new shape and scent to the bounty of the garden. I can hardly keep up; I mulch and trim and plant seedlings but it is as if I were on the end of the “crack the whip” game – I can only hold on tight and try my best to serve the beauty of the garden as I am flung and swung through its spurt of green growth and scented flowering. Here are a few images captured that may share some small part of this beauty; click on the first image to open the gallery. (All photographs ©2013 Lynn Emberg Purse)

Bearded Iris

Iris in sunlight

Garden in mid-May

Garden in late May

Iris ‘Beverly Sills’

Maple ‘Bloodgood’ and Geranium

Rosebud

Native Iris

Dark leaf Geranium

Clematis ‘Asao’

Clematis Ramona

Lantana

Tradescantia ‘Sweet Kate’

Columbine ‘William Guinness’

Columbine ‘Blue Barlow’

Iris ‘Immortality’

Viburnum flower

Full moon maple

Woodland after rain

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

To see more photos and read more about the fragrant wild black cherry that is native to the eastern US, see Bernadette’s post Wild Black Cherry.

The Wave Goodbye

Posted on May 11, 2013 by composerinthegarden

So close your eyes for that’s a lovely way to be
Aware of things your heart alone was meant to see ~Antonio Carlos Jobim

Bill and Jim at the Backstage Bar Photo by Doug Harper ©2012

Last Saturday, amidst a dozen other things claiming our attention, we attended the wake of a good friend and fellow musician. I must admit that I wasn’t looking forward to it, as he died the night before his 53rd birthday, much too young. But what I had feared as a sad evening mourning his death was instead a joyful celebration of his life, overflowing with laughter and stories. His girlfriend Marsha had filled a table with photos of Jimmy, many of them including my husband Bill, as they often performed together, two musicians in love with the guitar. Bill had put together a slide show of photos and videos of Jimmy teaching and performing – it was a joy to hear his voice and his guitar. The place was filled with musicians (many of them on their way to a gig) as well as various artists, radio personalities, friends, and family. I came home thoughtful and smiling.

Flamenco Gold by Sibthorp, used by permission GFDL via Wikimedia Common

A few nights later, I had a powerful dream. I was asked to sing a bossa nova song for a stage show, one that I recognized but had never sung, and I was being coached by three Brazilians, two women and a man. The women showed me how to move and dance to the music as I was singing – they considered this an essential element to performing the song properly. As I struggled to get everything just right, I saw a procession move forward from the back of the stage, solemnly moving as if in a slow dance step. Instead of two by two, it was a block of Brazilian men and women dressed in simple black clothes, nine across, nine deep. In the center of the procession was Jimmy, tall and blond, with a serious expression on his face broken by a small smile. As they proceeded to the front of the stage, I realized that I had been coached to sing this song as a farewell to my friend, as a tribute to him for using his musical gifts well. This was his ceremony to pass from one world to another, with an honor guard all around him. I awoke with the melody of the song ringing in my head; I realized that it was Wave by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Have you ever had a dream that was not about you, not about processing your own psyche, but something bigger, higher, truer than your personal issues, more real than waking life? This was that kind of dream. And I can’t get the melody of Wave out of my head, I’ve been singing and humming it for days now. My friend Kenia, Brazilian vocalist extraordinaire, has offered to coach me on this song, making part of this dream come true.

Here is a concert rendition of Wave beautifully sung in Portuguese by Esther Badia. (

Here are the English lyrics to Wave written by Jobim. Here is an English translation of the original Portuguese lyrics to Wave (the English song lyrics were also written by Jobim.)

Here is a recording of Jimmy playing another bossa nova, My Little Boat.

Jimmy, may you dance and strum your way into the next life with a smile on your face and escorted by music. Peace.

The Shape of Things

Posted on May 7, 2013 by composerinthegarden

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf. ~Albert Schweitzer

Each day brings more plants into leaf and flower. As I wander through the woods and gardens each morning, I realize that it wasn’t just color that I missed in this long winter past. It was the amazing cornucopia of shape and form that emerges from the trees and shrubs, the miracle of plants springing up from the bare earth in fresh new clothes. The early morning light gets caught in the shape and trembling of leaf and flower and I get lost in the looking. Enjoy.