“They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses
I have to admit that I have alway sort of dismissed roses as either too conventionally attractive, or too capitalistically romantic or too prescriptively symbolic to warrant deep investigation. I often tell people who ask me about flowers that they are already doing some of their best colour work in their petals and need no further intervention from the ink maker. But something in the way that the roses are hanging on this year, something in the strangeness of their tangled brambles and leaves in the gloom at the heart of a city asleep, made me look closer. And looking closer opened up a world. Or several worlds. This week I made ink in three ways with the whole plant of the rose and with radically different results. I collected and brewed and learned about the national soft drink of Slovenia and the rosehip neuron. I’ve begun to think of roses as something wilder and less predictable than my first assumptions— an edge of winter flower. And this week I was going to pull all my research and experiments and weather-altered moods into a multi-sensory letter to you called Rose Ink Three Ways. But last night looking over my writing, the stories of leaves, hips, and petals altogether felt too big to explain and I was hurrying too much. So instead, today I thought I would pare it back, slow it down and simply start at the place I first got curious. .
Part I : Afternoon, leaves
On a heavy late November day I stayed inside all morning. A slow sigh from the dog, limbs collapsed into the cushion and only part awake. Low thrumming sounds like pigeons through the walls next door, probably the mumblings of the radio spilling out its horrifying news. Through the walls you can smell the neighbours smoking pot. Like the dog and the neighbours I almost can’t move but I have a letter to deliver and I can feel the day sliding into afternoon. Outside the sky is blurry white with a pale sun just barely visible in the heavy cloudcover, like a mint sucked thin. I cross the street, through the yard in front of the police station. The City planted a hedge of rosebushes and donut-shaped concrete benches made purposefully impossible to sleep on. Defensive architecture designed when they built the police station to keep people from hanging around, but kids immediately started using the concrete donuts for loud inventive laughing games with ball and frisbies and the unhoused and late night partiers found a way to sleep in the middle of the donut, and the rosebush hedges over the years have been broken up by desire-line paths made where dogs left their messages and dog walkers found little gaps that became little paths splitting up the wall of thorns and opening up the police yard to the community even as the woody trunks and branches of the hedge thickened and twisted like some urban version of the briar rose fairy tale.
The rose petals have dropped pink and white and sweet wild fragrant now frozen or composted into the ground.
I mail my letter and buy a Mexican sweet potato squash and four tangerines and a handful of fingerling potatoes imagining their skins crackling in the oven with flaky salt and black pepper and olive oil. On my way back, I go in closer to the rose hedge and the sky, the whole world lids over into dull silver. The changing fall rose leaves pull me in. Serrated yellow edges, deep green, fresh green, washed out green, burnt bronze, freckled with black, five-leafed sprigs with tiny red thorns. Fine pins of sleet prickle in the white grey air. Leaves glistening in this almost frozen rain or sugar edged with the first snow. My fingers are almost frozen too. It’s just a hedge in the little green space in front of the police station. A big guy stops his big police SUV and says what are you doing, and I say I am collecting rose leaves and this leaves him speechless and I continue on. There is no one else out here. I’m dressed for the wet but not for this. Still I am getting inside something here. My eyes adjust to the fine differences of each leaf. Foraging when it takes over for me, really takes over. Dream building. My fingers are numb but they have been numb before and its irresistible this focused kind of being lost. Roseleaf sprigs! They seem to vibrate with an emergent beauty that comes off the almost frozen ground. I can’t stop looking and picking. I will figure out later what this is for. It’s getting blueblack early and the tannin burn flecked yellow against this downturning sky is the most beautiful of all.
I return home in the dimming light with a bag of wet thorny multicoloured leaves. I take a picture of them. I cook them up in an old pot and the water turns first the colour of apple juice and then the colour of Earl Grey tea and then darker into a strong brassy elixir. The whole kitchen smells bitter, earthy, raw, like some cough medicine from the old country. I filter the results and try it out on paper. I boil it one step deeper and filter again and leave it on the counter for a week where it ferments and molds. Are these tannins? Some other rare chemistry. The rose leaf—an intensification of the thing beside the thing said to be the most beautiful. Sidekick to the flower. Both ordinary and rare. And all their variation comes through onto and into the paper in waves. There’s something in the mold growing on top too. All that pigment. All the work of electrons, the geometries of carbon and oxygen the subtle ways they bend light. What do these rose leaves hold, what do they let go of? Charisma adjacent beauty, I write in my notes but with less assurance than the act of the ink slowly drying to tell its own story.
A SPECIAL NOTE
I have a 2-day inkmaking workshop coming up next weekend at the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-Op in Toronto. I haven’t had a chance to do a lot of in-person workshops in the last few years and there are a limited number of spots so I hope you will join us if you can. —Jason
And…For Subscribers only
I made a screen/saver wallpaper of all the tones of rose leaves from the hedgerow from that cold November day. (See above.) And at the end of this 3 part series on roses I will have all the rose ink recipes for you with tests and tips so it might be a good time to consider being a full subscriber if you were considering it.
I’d be happy to email you a high resolution jpg with proof of subscription as well. Please do leave a comment on the world of rose-colours or experimentations. I am still learning so much. Next week rosehips, and maybe petals as well. —JL
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