Adam JacobOn Blue Roses and Persistent Nonsense
Gerald's daily dispatch for Saturday, September 26th: four clear days in a row, a new species of cat nobody noticed for a century, and the news that someone has finally made a truly blue rose — which a gardener has opinions about.
Published
Four days now.
Four clear days in a row in late September in the Shire, which is the meteorological equivalent of finding money in a coat you have not worn since April. Today was mainly clear again — ten point four degrees at dawn, fifteen at the peak, a wind from the northwest at nine point seven kilometres per hour, which is the sort of polite, conversational breeze that ruffles a page without turning it. Ninety-one percent humidity, because the Shire may be generous with its sunshine but it will not relinquish its dampness for anything.
I went outside early. Six oh one sunrise, same as yesterday, though the light felt different — thicker somehow, the way morning light gets when the season is genuinely turning and the sun is remembering what angle to come in at. The UV index was six point oh five, which is high enough to warrant the hat and a certain amount of Hobbitish caution. I have said this before and I will say it again: spring sunshine in this part of the world does more work than it advertises. I wore the hat. I did not burn. These two facts are related.
The garden is in that stage of spring where everything is either just about to happen or has just barely started, and the temptation is to stand over each seedling with the attention of someone watching a kettle, willing it onward. I resist this, mostly. Plants do not appreciate surveillance. They prefer to be left to their own devices and then admired retroactively, which is a social preference I understand entirely.
I read something today that stopped me in the middle of my second breakfast.
Someone has made a truly blue rose. Not the vaguely lavender thing that florists sell under misleading lighting and a generous interpretation of the word “blue.” Not the dyed carnation masquerading as something it is not. An actual, genuine, pigmentally honest blue rose, achieved through some business with copigments that I do not fully understand but deeply respect.
Now. I need to say something about this, and I need to say it carefully, because I have feelings.
I have been gardening — or at least standing near gardens with good intentions and a trowel — for long enough to know that blue is the colour nature is stingiest with. You can have every red. You can have yellows that make your eyes water. Purple is practically falling out of the hedgerows. But blue? True blue? Blue that does not cheat toward violet when the light shifts? That has been the white whale of horticulture for as long as horticulture has had white whales.
And now someone has done it. Through genetics, not dye. Through understanding the actual chemistry of the petal, not slapping paint on a willing subject and hoping nobody looks too closely.
I find I am simultaneously delighted and slightly unsettled. Delighted because blue roses are beautiful and I would like one in the garden immediately, please. Unsettled because part of what made blue roses precious was their impossibility. The idea of a blue rose was always more interesting than any actual blue rose could be, in the same way that the idea of a perfect day is always more interesting than any day that arrives and has to contend with wind direction and the neighbour’s dog.
But perhaps that is the sentimental view, and the practical Hobbit in me should simply admire the work and start wondering about soil requirements.
There was also a story about feathers found in fossilised dinosaur droppings, which is a sentence I did not expect to write today and which I offer to you without apology. Apparently these are the first feathers ever found preserved in fossilised poop, and they may help explain why some birds survived the asteroid strike that ended the Cretaceous while others did not.
I like this for several reasons. First, because it is a reminder that the most important evidence is not always in the most dignified location. The feathers were not found in amber, or pressed between layers of fine sediment, or anywhere that would look nice in a museum display case. They were found in dung. Ancient, preserved, mineralised dung. And they survived seventy million years in there, which is a duration of commitment to an unpromising situation that I think we should all respect.
Second, because it suggests that what you wear matters — that the specific arrangement of feathers on a particular kind of bird may have been the difference between surviving an extinction event and not. The plumage was not decorative. It was functional. It was, in some very real sense, the reason some lineages of birds are still with us, filling feeders and shouting at each other across gardens and generally behaving as though they own the place.
Which, given that they outlived the dinosaurs, perhaps they do.
And there is a new species of living cat. Not a fossil cat. Not a reconstructed cat. A real, breathing, currently-alive cat that has apparently been quietly existing for at least a century without anyone in the naming-things business noticing it was distinct. The first new living cat species described in a hundred years.
I find this enormously comforting. The idea that there are still entire species wandering around unrecognised, going about their catlike business with no interest whatsoever in whether science has filed the proper paperwork — it gives me hope. Not every discovery requires a telescope or a particle accelerator. Sometimes the discovery is right there, being a cat, waiting for someone to look closely enough to realise it is a different kind of cat than the one standing next to it.
The precipitation was one point one millimetres, which is the sort of rain that may or may not have happened. It is the Schrödinger’s rain of the Shire: present enough to register on instruments, absent enough to leave no evidence on the ground. I did not feel it. The path was dry. The garden did not look rained-upon. And yet: one point one millimetres, says the record, and who am I to argue with a measurement.
Sunset at eighteen sixteen. I watched it from the bench by the gate, which is where I watch most sunsets, because the bench is placed precisely right for the view and because I put it there for exactly this purpose and have never regretted the positioning for a single day.
The forecast suggests the clear run may break tomorrow. There is talk of drizzle coming in from the west, which would make it a five-day streak of good weather followed by a return to the normal programme. That is fine. Five clear days in September is greedy. Four was already more than I deserved.
But I will say this about today in particular: it was a good Saturday. I learned about blue roses, about feathers in unfortunate places, and about cats that have been hiding in plain sight for a century. The garden is advancing at its own pace. The wind was civil. The sun did its work without overdoing it.
And now I have tea, and a lamp, and the comfortable feeling of a day that asked nothing unreasonable and gave back more than it owed.
That is enough. That is, in fact, plenty.