Rosarium

Essay and photos by NATALIE VESTIN

They’ll bloom early if spring comes early, which never happens. Many shades of pink, dawn and sunset awash. Depths as fathomless as an inland sea, rose as anemone. I don’t know if all roses have stories, but I know that all rose gardens do, that roses speak as a collective. I know that gardens are intended to be walked through and experienced both as a path and as points of encounter.

The Duluth Rose Garden is an end. Or, the Duluth Rose Garden is a solution, an answer to an old question raised again and again by urban planning and the possibilities of modification. Ausma Klints built the Duluth Rose Garden in Minnesota’s Leif Erickson Park overlooking Lake Superior in the 1960s, and she purchased the roses herself and ran it with volunteers for twenty years until it was destroyed to make room for the construction of a freeway. In 1994, the garden was rebuilt near its original location but directly in seven feet of soil on top of the freeway’s terminal overpass, still overlooking the lake whose cold winds keep the three thousand heirloom rose bushes in a state of uncanny antifungal perfection.

The freeway ends under a hovering plot of earth. The hover is heavy on a gray day, unnoticeable otherwise. After they were moved to a bit of earth atop a road that stopped, the roses adapted (though what choice did they have?). You can see the lake in the roses if you know how to look, how to find freshwater in a rose or in a trilobite-laden cliff or a girl’s hair. Pigment takes on a different tone, light falls differently on the lake-touched.

The Duluth Rose Garden is an end to a road, to a person, to a landscape. Colors shift, and how they’re brought up from the earth by hand or machine or root or jaw or fungal whisper adapts to the clime and its demands. The garden marks the end and asks why a marker is needed, as if an end—a road that stops, a life somehow gone, a home as opposed to any other place—weren’t entirely obvious. As if the act of ending weren’t blatant enough sign that things would no longer continue as they were. Or, if they continued, they’d do it there and not here, and they’d make you cross.

But to mark an end is a warning: you can’t turn back or you can retreat only with great difficulty. A warning can also be an expression of great care brought to kiss great difficulty. It can be a sign that roads, landscapes, and lives transform suddenly and often irrevocably. I say irrevocably because of what’s underneath, and it’s all underneath, still. It’s when things hold still that you can feel what marks it—what’s ended and what will never end. Come along, and we’ll discover the meaning of heirloom, and I’ll show you what a chorus of roses will have to say.

As the name suggests, heirloom roses are old, and because they are old, they are, in some ways, not in favor. Or, they’ve been split into what is favored and what has been improved upon. But then there is also that old false guidepost of authenticity before which the often apocryphal heirloom must defend itself. Heirloom roses were probably first cultivated in China, and a rose can only be heirloom if it were cultivated before 1867. Anything after, and it finds itself suspected of manipulation, an overeager reply to a desired spectrum when those tiring of pink request an alternative color, when the rose hems in its form before accusations of mere shrubbery. The sincere heirloom is ungainly, slumping and climbing and slattern, and almost always pink.

Empress Josephine’s Malmaison was an heirloom rosarium that inspired Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s cataloguing of all a heritage rose could be in Les Roses. The definitive guide until it wasn’t. We described the world like this: a past of books and gardens. Lists of how things were and their ranges, as if range might be restriction. We looked back and drew lines around cultivation, geographies, geometries, and pigments according to structure and genetic expression. As if the expression of inheritance weren’t form, as if what we were given was pocketed away and never met the later gifts of air, water, food, acid, and fungi.

Heirloom roses don’t unfurl and that’s part of the problem, as somewhere along the way, someone wanted a tea rose, a rose that teased, flower appearing as different roses in the manner of the moon’s phases. They wanted to see it as a rose of habit, a rose evincing new and strange wonders each day, a rose of ever more beautiful progress and fruition. They wanted a rose that took them on a journey. They wanted not just a flower, but a bloom.

The heirloom rose lounges and drapes. It laces its blooms with shrubbery and many forms of leaves. It adapts to circumstance, though not with especial grace, grace and adaptation being often at odds. It thrives, it claws, it grasps, it flings. It climbs, it roves, it expands, it holds its space and fails to tease at anything. It refuses the desire for a greater span of color—yellow, carmine, peach—the complementary, the goes-with, the shades and values and ranges, the startle and soak of something other than pink.

But here, look at me, I’m telling you what a heritage rose is not: a choice-of-color, primly reaching, unfolding-as-a-delicate-mystery tea rose blooming again and again and again. And because I’m coming to you from a modernity smitten with the grace of the tea rose, I can only look at the decidedly pink and ungainly heirloom through that multi-colored veil. An heirloom rose is singular in its blooms and in its act of blooming, and perhaps for this reason, it finds itself willing to live with cold and frost, with polluted air and air with a tinge of salt on it, with soil over- or underworked, with misunderstandings regarding proper nourishment.

The heirloom rose is low and expansive, a pink city with a vast leafy and shapeless suburbia. It smells like a rose, the rose Shakespeare might have smelled before aroma was slowly bred out to achieve more colors and pleasing shapes. The heirloom is precedent; it tells you what one was once willing to exchange. It is the infinite spectrum of pink. Try not to walk through an heirloom rosarium without tasting birthday cake on your tongue, a cake that forsakes the delicate tea rosettes for an unwieldy sprawl of sugar.

Libraries and indices taxonomize them. Heirloom roses recall much of the cultivation class system they had before 1867. They hold their origins and their futures both in their pollen and in their categories: alba, bourbon, English rose. Damask, gallica, moss. Grandiflora, kordesii. Rambler, Ayrshire, hybrid. Bracteata, laevigata, sempervirens. They carry unruliness and the expectation of a handed-down messiness in their shapes: bushy, climbing, pillar, rounded spreading, upright-bushy, and, my favorite, sprawl-climb-if-trained. And all those shades of pink? Those are filed under apricot blend, deep pink, mauve, medium pink, orange pink, pink blend, orange red, and russet.

On the day after my grandma’s funeral, I went to the Duluth Rose Garden. What I remember of the burial: a low hillside, a particular diagonal of sunlight just to the left of me, the fact that I thought it would be awful, and it was at points, but it was also warm and beautiful, that warm beautiful knowing air that sometimes stands just off to your left. Peripheral vision, the corner of your eye. That kind of knowing in the barest slant of seeing. I knew that my grandma was irrevocably gone and also right there, and I knew that, for all the fear and grief and agony that can surround death, there is often none of that—not even close, not on the same wavelength—in the thing itself. The being changed and being gone and being here. That’s what was in the peculiar diagonal of sunlight.

I walked through the rosarium’s series of circles. I looked at the roses and took photos with my phone. All the shades of pink, all the plummeting detailed centers like their own galaxies. It was a hot, cloudy day, the wind off Lake Superior bringing the particularly lonely smell of freshwater. I was wearing a long black skirt and a blue-and-gray striped shirt. The aerial lift bridge to the west, seen better when crouching down to photograph the roses, and the smooth gray surface of the lake occupied all horizon I could see.

And when I looked at the photos a few days after returning to my apartment in the city, I can only say that they looked different from every other photo on my phone. An inexplicable, impossible-to-ignore difference. I could tell you about the light and the green darkness and the saturations of pink and the sloppy, lovely, accidental compositions made by a person who had lost and not lost her grandma and was taking photographs while walking through the prescribed concentric journey of a rosarium a day after a slant of light appeared in the periphery of a northern Minnesota cemetery. I could tell you what else this person had seen in the vicinity of this cemetery, and how the air was different there, in this area of rock formations and fossils and hills and one-story houses and dead-end roads and Indigenous people who called this area home and still do despite the increasing difficulty of simply being home and will continue to call it home into the future.

I could tell you that the air there smelled like the past and losing the past and holding the past at the same time. I could tell you how this area lives in my mind like I cut it out of time with scissors, because I’m telling you, this area was cut out of time with scissors. You can still see the marks. But that’s not why the rose photos—green leaves, pink petals, gray lake, and all the yellow genetic information building a future—looked different. They just looked different, and my grandma was gone and here. And now we’re here.

Structural range is a restriction imposed by an heirloom rose in its deep inner parts and the possibilities of organ to become bloom or leaf. Bloom or leaf will be left unchosen in a decision that gathers at the center of the rose in order to one day fling, refract the light. That light, do you know what I mean? When it falls so that, out of the corner of your eye, without turning, you catch what’s been forgotten in a haste to heal or an urgency to forget.

An embryonic moment that looks like the gift of a choice to become one way or another, all destiny clasped in a tight fist of becoming. A bud. The chance to become flower or leaf, crown or verdant organ, though this is my lens: seeing the organ as subservient to brilliance and misunderstanding brilliance as whole, as body, as one. And one so integrated it refutes the destinies, the becomings, of its myriad lower parts. The axillary buds are named for where they grow in the shaded places where a leaf and the stem come together, and to encourage their becoming, you cut the plant right below. On me, the axilla are where limbs meet torso—the armpits, groin—and where an expansiveness moves outward, reaches, and always returns.

The first things. All the becomings and how they go on without end. A garden is a reminder that nothing ends. Your attention makes it what it is. The becoming of the bud. The calyx: the middle way. A calyx will become a flower, but in its incipiency, it bears the mark of the choice to be both. Flower and leaf, become and becoming, axilla and how they expand. The calyx is merely the sepals—green grasp of a bud, hand both cupped and closed until brilliance pushes it open. And I think we can say unfurls, though I want us to remember we are speaking not of the tea rose but of the ungainly heirloom. We can say unfurls because here we are at calyx, at sepal, at the silence that must have felt like God grinning right before the Big Bang. Here we are at the becoming of what covers and holds and, no, not protects, we can’t go that far in this icy air. Here we are at the becoming, not the beginning, of what stays with.

The rose itself is part of a series of parts, each building on the other, upward and outward. In this way, a rose can look like the fulfillment of a promise, an answer to a burgeoning question, the reward of paradise at the end of an arduous journey filled with moral tests. But neither a stem nor a pedicel is a moral test any more than a bloom is any greater fruition compared to a leaf. The corolla—that part of a rose characterized by petals—builds on fusion, the sepals, petals, and stamens all coming together to form a tube and its expansion. What must it be like to be the destiny of a plant, its aegis? What is it like to twine oneself with many others until one forgets one was ever separate or functionally distinct and then the most temporary, fragile, and dependent of beings—the rose?

The problem in thinking of history as a series of bookended dates is that it lends the impression that things end, which, of course, they never do. Things stop, but they never end. And this is the problem with all stories and all wars and all gardens, this presumption of an ending.

Consider this: Duluth Rose Garden founder Ausma Klints in the years between the old country and the new. Consider that the Second World War and its atrocities, its deprivations, its sights grasped tightly by the here and now and then by memory, is said to have ended in Europe in 1945. And then everybody went home.

Or, consider Ausma Klints in Munich, working as a nurse in an International Refugee Organization hospital, tending to the needs of displaced persons, persons held in place in this hospital when there was war and then no war and borders and then no borders, and the whole world was ending and the whole war was ending and nothing in this place ever truly ended, and maybe there was a garden, not like the gardens in Ausma Klints’ home country of Latvia that soaked up the smell of the sea and the low cold gray sky, but a little garden, one built for comfort in a hospital, where one could sit until dark and then keep sitting and watching as the day and night took their shapes and the heart held its place. Picture a garden as somewhere that the eternity of a moment might make the only sense available.

Consider Ausma Klints in this large brick building in Munich toward what is called the end of the war. Picture the displacement in Europe that didn’t end when the war is said to have ended. Picture the suffering, the silences, the one thing leading to the next but never leaving. Picture the inability of many to return home, even in their hearts, the heart having its attachments to geographies, which, when obliterated, leave the heart untethered. Picture the heart still reaching.

Consider Ausma Klints and her husband and their two children on a ship to Duluth, Minnesota. I picture her on deck, watching the horizon and thinking about endlessness and how endlessness is both similar to and nothing like being trapped. She made a home in Duluth, and she felt something missing. In her obituary, her daughter Rasma said, “Roses were her love.” Some might think this is strange. Others might think that what we turn our gaze to in love enables us to love everything else. Ausma proposed a rose garden to the city, a rosarium made of interlocking circles like the gardens in Latvia and across Europe. She might have loved Duluth in that way you love a city when you’re trying to get it to love you back. That kind of home-making love.

What is it like to love a place that you want to feel is home and to go out and build a rose garden because of that? Or build anything. To look at what’s not here—what could make a hard place more of a home—and make it be here. “It was her whole life,” said Rasma.

I read somewhere that roses look good in any photo because people know what they are. No one has to work out what they’re seeing. Which begs the question: if we already know what we’re looking at, what are we missing? All color is reflected light, just like all color embodies a separation of light, light disjoined to become a foreign brilliance.

One of the odd things about color though is that it’s always been a beast to capture. Whereas light, that ephemeral and shifting sprite, has proven easy to reproduce in photographs, whether it’s sunlight, candlelight, the soft touch of shine on the eye orbit or on a petal further from the depths of the floral tube, and its shadows too and all the depths light paradoxically illuminates. The scenes and emotional complexities it hints at, the way it reveals our hearts, not only in where it lands and the territories it skirts, but in how light allows one so simply to make an image of itself, so easily that we might ask occasionally what we are actually seeing. The cheekbone, the deep nestle of rose.

The methods of emulsion, layer, pigment, gaze, and documentation. Gabriel Lippman was the first to make a color photograph. In striking one wave of light against a mercuric mirror of his own making, Lippmann found himself not only with two waves, but with twins. His waves oscillated at the same frequency, the crest of one riding the crest of the other, one sallying forth to become the other, one returning and seeking to meet its source for the first time.

In trying to understand why the rose photos on my phone looked so unusual, I read Lippmann’s Nobel lecture. I found a description of his process on the Jewish Virtual Library. Some descriptions intelligible, some not, some accurate, some less so for the sake for describing a thing properly. In this way, I put things together.

As a physicist, Lippmann knew that the human eye can’t comprehend the frequency of light waves. It can only note any interference. So much of what’s here is missed, at least in these bodies and at this end of the electromagnetic spectrum. And so much of what’s seen is an interaction, a relationship, a tussle in time and space. Not what is, but what affects it and moves it into the realm of what might catch our eye.

The methods of emulsion, layer, pigment, gaze, and documentation. And the slow progression. The iterations or the accidents, the inevitabilities that appear to lead to progress. Following Lippmann’s interference, which proved impractical as a color photo process, were James Clerk Maxwell’s red, green, and blue filters and layers firmly brought together to produce an array, an acceptable entirety rendered apart in order to be put together. And then came Kodak, with the beginnings of color film photography and emulsion—microscopic crystals suspended in a viscous fluid, crystals that captured and recorded the wavelengths of light.

Much of reproducing color away from its source has so little to do with pigment, so little to do with actual dye, and so much to do with how we see color and the questions we pose to light, where it begins and how it ends. Now, with digital photography, we find ourselves back with Lippmann and his knowledge that we cannot see the frequency of light, but we can detect its interference. Instead of emulsion, layer, pigment, and crystal, we have sensors, but we still rely on our gaze and documentation to tell us what we’re seeing. The sensor records the intensity of light and separates it into red, green, and blue in order to put it together again as a full spectrum recorded numerically and given over to our gaze and documentation to make of it what sense we will. We still rely on what happens when light hits a surface we’ve lovingly prepared for the prodigal, a destination readied for what returns when the traveler leaves.

Rose petals owe their colors primarily to two groups of pigments: the yellow-forming carotenoids and the red-producing anthocyanins. But no pigment stands unaffected by the structure it colors, and its relationship with form goes back to some semblance of a beginning. As heritage roses were bred and cultivated, likely in Chinese gardens, they began that journey that all organisms seemingly veer toward at their origins.

At their beginnings, roses grasped at greater complexity, at the vulnerabilities of specialization and its need both for separated parts and homesickness for the whole. They heaped atoms into molecules. Their future selves cried out for sunlight, acid, mineral, carbon dioxide, the wealth of seasons, and the acceptance of what you are for where you are. The acceptance of your end at the building of your beginning. When they cried out, the burgeoning structure listened. It built and built and strayed from the home of the whole in all ways but for appearance. Pigments were locked in, the skeleton of photosynthesis composed itself, the roots reached down to an earth they’d never known and took what they’d always wanted.

People used to think that flower pigments could express different colors—yellow in one location, purple in another—because of the acidity of the soil. But the heritage rose, adaptable though it is, is also self-composed, stronger for its environment but not losing itself to any and every change demanded by it. Pigment changes over the years and in different settings can be attributed to the lively workings of pigments in the rose, their identity as molecules moving toward complexity so often subsumed by a belief that they are simply dyes. A pigment or a color is never simply a dye. It is a world of desire and trajectory.

And here we find the heirloom rose shifting toward and away from stability. Pigment builds towers and tears down fortresses in complete denial of any gaze that views a flower’s growth as linear. A rose never succumbs to any stasis or false death imposed by a lengthy past. Its pigments seek relationships with other molecules, leading to gradations in color intensity, qualities that enable the rose to respond more intimately to longer wavelengths. Apricot blend, deep pink, mauve, medium pink, orange pink, pink blend, orange red, and russet.

A rose never forsakes its heritage. A rose sees the future in the here and now, the future carried along with the past throughout time. When we say heirloom, we speak of something lost, held precious even as it was long ago discarded. When we say heritage, we gesture to what will never end, to what we carry with us, what we plant, what traces the remembered whorls on our fingertips as we bury them in soil. As we wind our ways. Not an easy home, not a path, not an end to a war or a journey, neither a place to return to a center nor a mercuric mirror, not a memory turned to some solid sense by a trick of the light, but a garden.