Rosa ‘Benjamin Britten’

alexwh
Photographs, Photography & Words
1 min readMay 21, 2020
Rosa ‘Benjamin Britten’ — scan from my garden — Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Thursday, May 14, 2020

O Rose, thou art sick!

It has been my experience after having grown roses since 1987 here in Vancouver that roses are like babies and cats. They never perform on demand. They do as they please and often they can surprise you when you are not looking.

The David Austin English Rose Rosa ‘Benjamin Britten’ is ample proof that I may be right. This year, a month ago, the leaves that emerged all had some sort of black spot. I sprayed the rose with the only BC acceptable fungicide Safer’s

Defender. I pulled a few of the infected leaves. The plant looks terrible.

And yet today I found this glorious bloom. It reminded me that Benjamin Britten wrote a work for that William Blake poem. And here it is.

Originally published at http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.

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alexwh
Photographs, Photography & Words

Into Bunny Watson. I am a Vancouver-based magazine photographer/writer. I have a popular daily blog which can be found at:http://t.co/yf6BbOIQ alexwh@telus.net