​The weather moved me yesterday.  It was misty in that patchy, anomalous way that means you can't see shit one moment while it's clear as a bell 10 m down the road.  Always look behind you into the sun during mist.  These are a wee bit noisy but the camera was ancient and tiny, so whatever.  I didn't throw on any FX filters, just black and whited them.  This is pretty much how it looked.

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The sun was pushing through the watery suspension and lensing into the void over the bay in the form of a cold white rainbow- the opposite of darkness yet somehow vacant of all the properties you expect of light.
​ I had never seen this before.

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It's 3.38 am and this is the first and only draft.  Enjoy.

​

On this anonymous rootstock it is a good doer, tolerating considerable interference from underplanting and general shovel intrusion.  This is especially praiseworthy because high-quality flower producers are usually hungry, thirsty and fussy about setbacks.  I don't think our CdP has ever lost a main cane or aborted a flower cycle in spite of these insults, nor have I seen it defoliate with rust or blackspot, our two main aggressors.  So two thumbs up for health. ​

But let's face it, no one plants Chartreuse de Parme for its rude health or admirable posture.  Rose fanciers are flower sluts and this one comes through with a cyclic sufficiency of tough, slightly leathery, classic tea rose blooms in an intense, hypnotic blue magenta with a slightly silvered reverse (please note the camera exaggerates this phenomenon, especially in the above and below pics).  That pleasing sculptural form and glowing colour withstand rain unscathed, remaining almost supernaturally clean.  This is super-important in a maritime climate.  CdP is a standout cut flower both in the vase and as the star of a bouquet, lasting well and playing nice with a lot of other flowers.

 You may hesitate to expect more and yet there is a definite and respectable perfume, a medium-strength old-school tearose with a bit of dusty fruit and that cool unplaceable note that is possibly unique to this class.  Sawn blonde wood?  Crushed leaves?  Aged pot pourri?  The scent lasts pretty well and can sweeten up in the vase but lacks a wee bit of silage, if I'm going to pick any nits.

Does CdP suck in any respect?  Not really.  It can sometimes be a bit bloom-shy in the first spring cycle for me despite full sun.  There might be an extended lull between flushes, understandable given the biological cost of such quality flowers.  And like many five-star prospects, Chartreuse de Parme is congenitally unsuited to sitting quietly in the landscape.  It will stand out like dogs’ bollocks unless provided with similarly flamboyant companions, so don’t plant it thinking it will somehow magically calm the fuck down if you throw enough gypsophila at it.  Give her red and lime euphorbias and delphiniums and those giant African lobelias to hang with.  CdP's surreal circus beauty is no clown show and deserves pride of place.

Thanks to Jo for the phone pics.  We had to wait in a sweaty line full of students to view this vegetal hulk and convey its magnificence to you, constant readers.
 
​YOU'RE WELCOME.

How's it going?  

I'm posting new things.  Doing it.  Doing it.  
Feels good.

The blank black sign looks shopped but it was real, wired onto the fence outside the Port facility. Then it was sadly withdrawn, presumably by the very same hand that affixed it, sucked back into the silent wormhole of entropy from whence it came.  All I know for sure is that someone billed us for it.

There's been some quite good tagging on the trains lately, but we hardly ever have a camera when we see it.

The Gen X bellwether influences in Pat McGrath’s aesthetic will always be an intrinsic pillar of her appeal to we peeps of a certain vintage.  That darksided moosh of dirt and luxe, sinister historical x futuristic bling, the visual angst and effusion.  She came up with freaky units like Philips and Garland, McQueen, Galliano and Mugler et al., at a time when everything was on the slab and subject to the art school scalpel.  McGrath's shit is instantly recognisable and largely worthy of the reverence it receives.  So refreshing in these tawdry times!

I’ve always admired two things about the Pat McGrath range from a distance; voluptuous packaging and the rigorous specificity of her individual shades.  Each one is a look per se, existing for a particular reason instead of just occupying some pointless rung on a chromatic ladder (see: latter-day MAC).  It's a bit weird then that Unnatural Natural (Luxetrance) is the first McG lipstick I’ve owned.   That would be because the retail price tag is beyond insane; pushing $80 here in the southern hemisphere with postage and that’s a fuck outta here situation, vanity be damned.  If you’re going to snatch an entire hundy, you better knock me on my arse with unconditional pornographic awesomeness.  So I dodged that trauma and picked it up second hand.  

​Unnatural Natural is, I think, discont’ now but there’s plenty still knocking around online; I salute my budget-conscious hos with this belated review.

Shaw's mirror showed him the remaining conscript emerging from his suicidal transport.  Scrabbling to his feet, the man stared up at the over-looming parapet as though waiting for it to pronounce a deferred doom.  The wind flapped his clothes against his body and snow blurred him momentarily; when nothing more occurred, he murmured and began to brush himself off with mindless hands that fell once more to slack disuse while Susan searched the empty castellations on her own account, closing her eyes and dropping back onto her knees.

​Still in a crouch of his own, Shaw began to struggle out of the ephemera that was strapped to him.  Josephine snatched up the tracking device he had cut loose and threw it back at him, striking his shoulder.

"You won't get clear... " she promised, watching him upend his pack and gather what he needed.  "She'll spill everything when they get her in the chair..."  
"This place is fucking empty, she doesn't know shit and you..."  Breaking off, he lunged forward after Susan's hands, too late to stop their lashing strike.  She punched the split length of silvered pine butted in her fists into Josephine's thigh, committing her entire weight to the assault; driven deeply, the dry wood pierced her skin, skidding then stubbed blunt between the knot of bones and sheaths inside her knee.  The woman retched out a rasping cry, clutching the leg as the shard shifted in the flesh contracting round it and Susan launched herself at her, clubbing furiously at her face with both bound hands.  They slid together down the wet slope; Shaw shouted after them, but as he struggled to his feet it was the sucking crack of a bullet loosed from the ruin that stilled the women struggling below.

His head snapped forward on his neck and opened, expelling wet red and thick sodden pink through the outward dissolution of his features.  The hot matter struck the side of Susan's face; his body listed, dropping to and falling forward from its knees.  On the ledge the remaining conscript caught a second round and toppled before the sound of the first had died away.  Susan kicked back from the woman underneath her, fingers sliding on a small stretch of half-buried black, a pistol jogged from its holster and stamped into the thin snow.  Snatching it up, she planted her boots against the woman's hip and aimed the weapon at her face.

Her shot threw the pistol backward in her hands.  A knocking report swept down the hillside as a booming seashore echo, leaving a dark puncture in the snow by Josephine's left ear, but before she could amend her aim, a grasp closed on her jersey and hauled her sideways; keeping his hold on her, Sachiin swung his rifle from his shoulder and struck the stranger senseless with its stock.  

The soft sound of his voice puzzled Susan, seeming new to her while behind them his brother cast fresh snow over the ledge in dropping from it, holding his rifle clear.  The chain still bound her to the nameless woman and she exclaimed in sudden and visceral repugnance, casting up screeds of dirty snow as she pounded her boot against the latters' arm and ribcage until Sachiin cut the black cuffs from her wrists.  With her freed, he sat down on the slope as though his legs had failed him, finding the hand that hung by her side with his own and breathing a prayer of thanks, his eyes still wide and holding a ghost of their commonplace shade.  Shaw's stricken body shifted weakly in a slow, petering contraction, closing on itself with a series of little shudders, like a child wracked by the distant passage of a dream.

Susan cleared her throat and slid her hand from his to push back her loosened braids.  The snow wandered against her face as she drew her sleeve down over her wrist and used it to wipe the thick pink spatter from her mouth.



Blushing pulses of pain roused Josephine to the sight of dark eyes in a pale scowl blurred down to lithic tones and shifting, misted shapes.  The girl wrestled her black boot from her left foot, wrenching the leg that had swollen around the shaft of wood still buried in its knee.  With her head to the foot of the ruin, Josephine saw the curving wall loom in a dreadful grey parabola, black cuffs securing her hands at the small of her back, though she could no longer feel them.  Her former captive shuffled her feet into the warmth of the stolen boots, walking a short distance and stopping to rock back and forth, then stooping to lace them with her best hand.  Josephine's rifle slid forward against the back of her head from where it hung across her shoulders.

The small party had chosen sparingly from the vanquished corps' equipment, satisfying necessity more than preference, Susan taking obsessive care to locate those samples wrested from her person.  Having segregated them in the midst of the clearing, she looked again toward the survivor and stamped her new boots over the fragile receptacles, splintering and kicking them into oblivion.  Behind her, Sachiin lifted her pack to test the balance of the load, cheating Fyodor's questing snout of the rations stowed in its compartments.  Shaw's body lay like refuse, limbs left skewed by their passage over the stony ground; a florid drag had trailed the remaining portions of his head like effluent bleeding from a rusting pipe.  

Josephine did not know that her weatherproof garments had been awarded to Susan, feeling only random and dissonant elements of her own exposure, pinching pain and blue-hued absences.  The fraternal creatures standing before her claimed the whole of her faltering attentions, the fauna of a lost continent that drifted away slowly while they walked its distant shore, a paradox that crowded all else backward.  Snow embraced them as surely as it reviled her, closing like the jungle around the oscillated feline and leaving nothing to explain.  She ate what she could get of them until the memory began to seize and fracture, choked with their detail, closing her eyes only when the frowning girl complained to a companion of her stare.

The shadow had been scoured from the wall beneath the steps since Petrouchka's demise.  Sachiin followed its curve to her remains, where his hands moved in a simple observance, articulating sorrow and gratitude.  That which had been spared by her immolation was already half-interred by snow, its sated darkness consumed in turn.  

"I don't think she did it for us." Susan ventured, standing at his side.  He half-turned to pick her up and held her dumbly.  "Breathe." she urged into his ear, appraised of the suspension he still suffered despite her warmth and sentience.  His brother brought tape from Josephine's kit and Sachiin set her down to wrap her injured fingers; she watched their crushed colours disappear, letting him go to make a final sweep of their surrounds.

"They could have had us all by now.  You should have gone." she told Kala'amātya.  He did not reply.  

"I put my foot down." Sachiin admitted. 

​"Again?"  Susan's face slackened into a half-formed smile, but it was dismissed by the purpose that turned her back toward Kala'amātya and prompted her to trail him as he performed his own final survey of the debris broadcast around them.  "Petrouchka was lying..." she whispered, wiping stiffened hair from her cheek and awaiting some sign that he was attending to her communique,  "She told me Helaine was happy, and then sad... not the other way around."  His acknowledgement was wordless and delayed, evinced as an expression he turned away from her, but she was gratified, and stood to work a glove over her injured hand.  He emptied the rifle he had used to kill Shaw and the conscript, laying it out beside Josephine in an act that Susan came slowly to appreciate.  "That cow was the one who did this to my fucking hands."  She leaned once more over the woman's leg, examining the wound she had inflicted with a satisfaction as plain as carbon daubed across her face.  "It looks bad..."   

Josephine's gaze continued to mine the precious values of Kala'amātya's surface.  He returned her stare with something forged beyond the windblown, fox-grey span of prosaic indifference.

"Will she walk, if she makes it out of here?"

"Eventually." he conceded.   Susan squinted at her own irresolution when his silence became expectant.  

"So it's up to me..."
​
"She's your mark.  You get the horns."
​
​"I think I'll leave it.  It sort of feels like throwing back a live grenade." she declared, taking out the pistol and directing it at Josephine in passing.  "It won't be your fucking knee next time." she promised her, joining Sachiin as he moved out, the piglet trailing him closely.

They skirted the stiffening remains of the corps; Susan held her companion's hand in negotiating the drop onto the snow-blurred trail, blowing the flakes from her fringe and urging him onward.  The narrow way curved to the east with the hollow leading from the weathered spur, the clouds lowering to graze the apex of the tallest pines.  Where the steps diverged they halted, the brothers murmuring to one another, Kala'amātya offering a handgun and a fold of bills to Sachiin and accepting a camouflaged bag in the exchange.  The latter lifted Fyodor from the snow and over his shoulder, stuffing the small animal under the cowl of his pack.

"Sis'thle bai'in." he said softly, addressing the brief courtesy to his brother.
"What's this?  Where are you going?" Susan demanded.
"West." replied Kala'amātya.
"East." Sachiin confirmed when she looked back to him. 

"But... when will..."  The question's plaintive irresolution and the expression that accompanied it took them both by surprise, Kala'amātya shifting the rifle to his left shoulder.  He waited momentarily, then lifted the hood of his sweatshirt, stepping up onto the westward flight.  She caught his arm and turned him back toward her.  "Wear you teeth, and don't be such a bastard." she whispered, wresting something small from the pocket of her jeans and pushing it into his grasp.  "It's got a filling, but don't throw it away... it's definitely lucky."

He looked down at the tooth in the palm of his hand, then turned again and began the long climb toward the wooded ridge, his footprints first softened, then obliterated by snow.  Blowing on her hands, she watched her breath curl in plumes as he was lost to them, still frowning to herself.

"Do you know where he's going?" she asked her remaining companion.
"Yeah..." Sachiin admitted through a seasoned scowl.  "I'm pretty sure I do."

He held out his hand and she stepped down with him in the opposite direction, beside the course of an infant spring, its silvered flux slicing through the snow in its desire for the darkness of the gorge.

😂😂😂😂😂😂
​To anyone genuinely wondering, no, this was not an Antifa gig.  Leftists and social justice people don't need euphemisms or false flag bullshit.  We say it all out loud and don't need to hide behind any weak-arse fuckery because our principles are clear and meaningful.

I did mention this before.  But it bears repeating.  
Stay safe!

C canariensis is a bit of a seasonal contrarian in that it dries out and retreats back into corky, dahlia-like tubers just below the soil surface in early summer, sitting out the stinging UV of our hotter months and reemerging in autumn.   ​Here the flower appears in early spring and can continue for a while until edible fruits occur, a prospect I hardly dare hope for.

In lieu of any specific advice about soil needs, I stuck mine in a 50/50 blend of rose mix and coarse pumice, guessing from its forest-slope origin that a relatively open, well-drained but humusy medium was called for.  It gets a good watering about once a week while in growth, and bugger-all over summer when dormant, so it's not particularly high maintenance.

While I have found most plants hardier than conventional wisdom allows I really would not roll the frosty dice and leave this fleshy guy out over night in any sort of high winds or winter.  The stems are hollow and easily munted.   Mine sits outside with my Aloes and has probably experienced close to freezing under a polycarbonate verandah, but any direct icing would turn it to sludge in fairly short order.  Too hot is no good either; C canariensis will apparently decline if your summers inflict extended temps over 25 C.  

Well shit, that makes two of us.