robertmealing.com

Helena Bonham Carter from The Guardian

The Guardian has published an interview and photoshoot with Helena Bonham Carter. I guess we’re building up for Alice in Wonderland. I love these photos, and the work she has been doing the past several years, she seems more alive and vibrant than ever. While discussing her relationship with her husband Tim Burton, she says “He likes to simplify things, I complicate them. I think we can do this or this or this, optionitis, then I get frozen because I don’t know which one.” Optionitis, boy, can I relate to that.

Photos:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/gallery/2010/feb/06/helena-bonham-carter-photographs

Interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/06/helena-bonham-carter-interview

I grew about sixty roses when I lived in California, I’ve lost exact count, but I’m sure I had at least that many. I knew that leaving the garden I spent several years creating would be one of the hardest things for me, just slightly less painful than leaving our many dear friends. I think of both very often, and now in the dead of winter, I’m dreaming of roses.

In the year and a half we’ve been in England, I’ve managed to pick up a few bushes, but we’re very limited as to what we can plant. Most of the back yard of our rented flat is paved with bricks, and in the middle of the garden is an enormous ash tree that from May onwards shades 80% of the garden; impossible for roses. There is a raised bed which you can see in the following picture, taken in June last year, that gets enough sun to grow roses and herbs as it is just out of reach of the shade for enough hours during the day.

You can get a real sense of the size of the ash tree by this image taken a few weeks ago during the big snow. I’m terrible with estimating height, but I think it must be at least 80 feet tall :

So we have very limited space to grow roses, and on top of that, we’re on a budget while I’m back at school, so there will be not great garden creation here like in California. I’m hoping that I might be able to buy a few bare root roses in the next few months, as the time to order and plant them is February and March.

So far, these are the roses that we do have in the garden, (I’ve not taken my own photos of most of these so I’ll use images from David Austin’s site for this group):

Alan Titchmarsh & Gentle Hermione

Scepter’d Isle & Sharifa Asma

Spirit of Freedom & Strawberry Hill

The Ingenious Mr Fairchild

I love all of them, especially The Ingenious Mr Fairchild and Scepter’d Isle which both bloom a lot and have intense fragrances. In fact, fragrance has become an utter necessity for me when choosing roses, I simply won’t buy another one that has a light or no scent. I want the added pleasure of not only looking at the rose but breathing in the heady scents, in all the varieties that roses produce. It’s like developing a taste for wine.

So I’ve been dreaming of roses, and dreaming of the garden that I would create if I had the resources. I’ve made this post as a sort of therapy that, hopefully, will allow me to indulge myself a bit and give some sense of satisfaction just by going through the process. So, here are some roses that I’d love to order this year, and hopefully, I might even be able to get a couple of them!

Jubilee Celebration

(This photo from Soho Rose Farm in Australia, all of the rest following are mine)

This one is a surprise to me. If you look at my collection so far, I’ve only ordered pinks, and I usually never like roses with strong colours or mixed colours, and here I am looking at one of the brightest and most mixed of all of David Austin’s roses. What changed it for me was visiting his gardens last year and seeing it in person. The scent is absolutely unbelievable. Strong, fruity, sweet, powerful. And there was something about the colour as well that gave it a faded and old-fashioned look.

I kept walking away thinking “No way, it is way off colour for your garden”, but I kept walking back, smelling it, and falling deeper in love.

Princess Alexandra of Kent
Another rose that I am surprised that I want so much. This one is clearly pink, but also a bit “brighter” than I would usually choose. However, seeing it in person made all of the difference:

Wow! Every bush that we saw of it at David Austin’s garden was covered with blooms. Huge, fragrant blooms that I could smell from feet away. The flowers are really incredible, majestic and impressive.

Lilac Rose

This rose has been around for a few decades, and I never hear much about it. I suspect that it’s probably unpopular for a good reason, and I have never given it a second thought. However, when I saw it in person, even with just a few blooms left on the only plant of it in the garden, I fell in love. I can’t think of any other word for this rose than “Victorian”. It has wonderfully ruffled edges and a powdery lilac colour with many shades fading at the edges, as shown in this close-up:

Lilac Rose also has a strong, old-fashioned rose scent to match. I find it charming and wistful.

The Wedgewood Rose

The Wedgewood Rose is one of the New Roses for 2009, and even if I wanted it I wouldn’t be able to order it until next season, it sold out immediately upon its release. But since this is my fantasy garden with my fantasy purchases, I’ll go ahead and add it in. This is another rose with rather tattered edges, but with a very soft shell pink colour and very large blooms which nod on the branches. It is gorgeous.

Of course, The Wedgewood Rose also has a very good scent. Utterly elegant and sophisticated, I think it will be a huge success for David Austin.

Jude the Obscure

This is the only rose on my list that I grew in California that I absolutely have to have again right away. There are other David Austin roses that I grew that I would love to grow again… William Shakespeare 2000, St Cecilia, Eglantyne, Sister Elizabeth, The Prince, Evelyn… all shown on this page of my California roses: http://www.robertmealing.com/2010/01/roses-from-my-old-garden/

But Jude is something special:

I love the huge, globular flowers on this rose, and the soft, faded golden yellow; but it is the scent that drives me wild. Jude the Obscure smells like sweet wine left in a jug infused with fruit on a summer’s day, and it is powerful and intoxicating.

It’s one of the few roses that I grew several bushes of in California, and it’s one that I just can’t live without for too much longer. It was heaven smelling that perfume once again when we visited David Austin’s garden.

Young Lycidas

Another surprise for me. I love the two-tone colour of this rose. Deep, rich, powerful. It reminds me of a fuschia. Of course, Young Lycidas also has a great scent.

Lady Emma Hamilton

I’m not sure what has happened to my tastes. Have they become more sophisticated and willing to accept complex combinations of colour? Have they become less refined and willing to allow gaudy combinations of colour? Detail:

Garrett loved this rose too, and I think that a big part of the attraction is the incredibly rich colour of the foliage. Deep reds and browns predominate, with shocking buds that look like flames, and then open up into beautiful, deeply scented blooms; fairly similar to Jude the Obscure in both shape and fragrance.

Well, that’s it. The top roses that I’d love to order this year, I think the one thing they all have in common is their very powerful scents. There are others that I’d add to the list as well… Pretty Jessica, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Brother Cadfael, Harlow Caarr, Claire Austin, Munstead Wood… but these are at the top of my list and the ones that I’d really love to try growing. Well, I can dream can’t I?

David Austin Roses: http://www.davidaustinroses.com/

The Jean Noblet Tarot - 1650, restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy

I’ve loved the history of tarot cards ever since I discovered that they were over 500 years old and that there is some mystery surrounding their creation and development. We know that tarot was created as a card game, and that a whole family of modern card games (like Bridge) are descendants of tarot. Historical evidence points to the first decks being created sometime in the early 1400s, probably in Italy, and probably in the royal courts of Milan, Florence, Bologna, or some other Italian city.

See, we’re not sure exactly who created the cards, and we’re not sure of when, or even exactly where, but we do know the why… they were used for hundreds of years to play a common and popular card game called tarot. Tarot is a “trump taking” game, and the word “trump” is connected to the earlier word for the game “Triumph” (or Trionfi in Italian), where one card would triumph over another just like in the triumphal parades of the period (both real and literary), where certain allegorical figures would triumph over the ones that came before it.

In tarot, instead of one of the four suits being used as the trump suit (like in other games at the time, and now.. such as “Hearts”), a whole new “fifth suit” was added to the game whose purpose was to trump the other suits. The regular four suits are the ancient card suits of Batons, Coins, Cups and Swords which were popular at the time and were latter changed by the French to Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spades.  The allegories in the fifth suit build up from a lowly man, to popes and emperors, to concepts of love and death, to the stars, moon and sun, to Judgement Day and finally a representation of the entire world. The most famous set of triumphs from the period is by Francesco Petrarch, a beloved and famous humanitarian from the 14th century, his trionfi poetry can be seen here. In his most famous set, Love triumphs over man, Chastity triumphs over Love, Death triumphs over Chastity, Fame triumphs over Death, Time triumphs over Fame, and finally… Eternity triumphs over Time. Many, if not all of these allegories exist in the the traditional pack of tarot cards. Here are a few cards from a royal deck from Milan created in the mid-fifteenth century illustrating a few of these trumps:

The Triumph of Love:

The Triumph of Love - 15th century tarot card

The Triumph of Death:

The Triumph of Death - 15th century tarot card

The Triumph of Time:

The Triumph of Time - 15th century tarot card

Over the centuries, probably millions of packs of cards were created as the game spread through Europe. France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and many other countries all adopted the game and created their own styles of cards. Tracing the styles as they evolved and modified is one of the most enjoyable parts of studying tarot history. Another aspect that I love is exploring all of the connected art and history that appears in or influences that artwork, ( degree course could be offered on just this aspect alone!). I also love the mysteries, there are some cards that are rather strange, at least to modern eyes, and the sequence doesn’t make as much sense as some other more straight-forward related works. I continually come back to the same questions: Who made them? Why did they choose these allegories? Why did they choose 22 of them rather than some other number? If there was a “story” that they intended to tell with the sequence, what was it? Tarot is a wonderful mix of history, mystery, and art. It’s a real-life “Divinci code” with hundreds of participants each coming to their own conclusions to solve the mysteries. I’ve heard theories of Gnostics, and Cathers, and Knights Templar, and Bards, and Elusian Mysteries and just about every other connection imaginable. Many people try to connect the tarot cards to the Jewish or Hermetic Kabbalah, or to Astrology, alchemy, or many, many other forms of esoterica. Others point to some of the obviously Christian imagery and associations, and look at tarot as an example of a traditional moral allegory.

Most of us are familiar with tarot card readers, a practice that probably existed from the start of the cards invention (just as people used dice, pages from the bible, and many other forms of divination at the time… if there is a element of chance involved, humans tend to use it for luck and fortune telling). The earliest documented use of tarot cards for divination that I know of is from Bologna in the mid-seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century, tarot cards were popularised by several French occultists (some of who claimed they were actually Egyptian hieroglyphs) and their popularity as such has grown in that area ever since. Over the past 200 years, new decks were developed based on the historical decks, but with new imagery, names, and sometimes even structure. Today there are literally thousands of decks available with artwork focused on everything from Mermaids and Pirates to Druidry, Native Americans or Victorian Romance. For me, it’s the old decks that are the real treasures. Thankfully, there are a few publishers who produce reproductions or restorations of many of the old decks, so we have access to them and can own copies of them. The image at the top of this post is of a reproduction of a deck created in Paris in the 1650s, this contemporary version was created by master cardmaker Jean-Claude Flornoy and is available on his website. This special edition is handcoloured using stencils, just as the deck would have been made over 350 years ago. He also offers a mass-produced version using traditional printing methods.

I’ve owned TarotHistory.com for four years, and I never seem to spend enough time developing it. A year ago I switched it to a blog format, but when I moved to England I just let it go as I have been preoccupied by other things. I also have a Tarot History forum set up to discuss the history and development of tarot cards. I’ve finally spent some time updating the weblog software, changing the art a bit, and starting the weblog and forum up again.

Visit the Tarot History Weblog.

Visit the Tarot History Forum.