Apparently the summer solstice and the full moon coincide tonight, so here’s a white rose – a rose for summer and white for the moon.
White roses always make me think of this line in Laurie Lee’s Home From Abroad:
The hedges choke with roses fat as cream.
which may particularly appropriate, as I gather that today’s full moon is a “strawberry moon” – not red in colour with pips on the outside, but so-named by the Algonquin tribes of North America as it marked the start of the strawberry-picking season.
Lee’s poem recounts the narrator’s reaction on returning to the verdant Kent countryside after travelling in the hot climes of the Mediterranean.
The rose in the photo is only a miniature in a pot and nowhere near as vigorous and flourishing as the ones Lee describes, but there’s been such rain recently that the countryside is certainly lush and green – a far cry from the image in this summer fragment written in Spain:
Corporation car park
Rose bushes straggle
from cracked earth. A lizard
trickles across concrete.
Memory of water.
don't confuse the narrator 
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