It may be warm, but it is bleak and the garden, well... see what I mean.
I need a rose.
Yes, that helps. It is not easy to write a gardening blog in these months, especially if you want to avoid the usual winter cliches. Looking at the local architecture that holds up our gardens, cradles and rocks them, is a partial solution, but not an entirely gratifying one. The light is hard, the buildings unsoftened. I need more roses.
In short, in my last post I extravagated. I dissed mansions and castles. I do not really dislike them, just the more money than taste ones.
And now, keeping on theme,(yes, there is a theme,) I am going to slip back towards an earlier post, "Roses in January," and fill in some information I did not include in the earlier post on The Red Rose Girls.
Below is a picture of Cogslea that shows more of the house and less of the caryatids.
And here's one of Cogshill from the back
The pergola at Cogshill.
And here is a relevant illustration from Elizabeth Shippen Green's scrapbooks at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Last of all. I want to credit the source of most of my information on The Red Rose girls. It is the book, The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love by Alice A. Carter, ISBN 978-0810944374.
And I also want to add a caveat, that this is an informal blog. Like informal correspondence and other forms of informal writing, such a blog is not meant to be read as a solid reference source. I try to be accurate but I do not fact check everything. For instance, I made a mistake about Edith Emerson in my earlier RRG post. I have gone back and corrected it as I value accuracy. At times however, I can find even myself a bit too transported by the act of writing, and end up extravagating reality's rose into a slightly stranger flower. So please, take this with a grain, though not a bucket, of salt. I know I do.
