Rose Ink in Three Ways

Part three: petals, night

photographer unknown

Part 3: Rose Petals, Night

Out here in this fogged-eye night, nothing is against me. I am searching. The sky is the colour of river clay. Branches are glossy with sleet. Everything is inside this grey gradient. I found this one last rose when I was looking for something else. It was fallen, a little bashed up but a heraldic spilled red. At workshops I often say that flowers are already doing their best work and do not need you to reconfigure them. Each petal is a sheet of paper singing the chemistry of soil and rain and air. And in my book I say something like do not steal flowers from your neighbours gardens unless you are young and drunk and in love and stumbling home on a summer night. But this rose seemed to have fallen at my feet, and flowers just before the winter sets in seem to live by different rules. So at home, I stirred that broken sidewalk offering in a glass with white vinegar and salt. The liquid stained a faint pink and I left it in the glass for three long nights and it intensified to the colour of pomegranate juice and on paper it was bright and lucid and as it dried, it changed into purples and blues and dried in layered frills and I saw this rose becoming something that I could not quite understand. But wanted to show you. And this third way, so salty, sharpened by time was the third recipe for you. And the moon edged between two apartment buildings. And page on the calendar turned over and it was December.

BONUS THINGS: This week in the Colour Lab: I will be sending out rose ink based screensavers for subscribers only or people who sign up before Wednesday in case you need some brightness in September.

Putting it all together

I thought I knew what I was going to tell you. This part was just going to be a recipe or two for you. And I do have a set of recipes that represent a few weeks experimenting with the whole rose plant available for subscribers to the colour lab, and I hope we can start a bit of a discussion there. I was going to tell you how the tannins released from the leaves are a tawny, tulle-textured brown, and bite into the paper. About how the yellows come out of the rosehips when they freeze and then thaw and soak in pure alcohol. About how the rose’s petals are a kind of crown to the pigments of this plant where the richest, pinkest ink that goes purple and then blue on the paper comes from. How layered the ink of the rose is, how surprising.

But then last week…