Barbra Streisand Hybrid Tea Rose

We replaced one of the roses that died in the bad winter a couple of years ago with this one (putting on a great show right now!) which was available in a can, so we didn't have to start with bare root. Here is the description from the Regan Nursery:

Barbra Streisand

Rosa Hybrid Tea

An avid rose lover, Barbra was very choosy when it came to picking a rose that would bear her name. It had to have large flowers with an attractive color. But mosst of all, it had to be fragrant! the Barbra Streisand rose certainly fulfills those desires. Just one big shapely blossom can nearly overpower you with strong sweet scent. The clean lavender colors show off strikingly against deep glossy green leaves. Her vigorous plant bears loads of long-stemmed beauties. Great for cutting or just for smellin  Yep! Smellin with no period!

and 

  Interesting Notes

This dramatic new lavender Hybrid Tea has rosarians falling all over themselves trying to out-brag each other about the extravagant number of perfect flowers on their tall, vigorous bushes. And the sweet, heady perfume is reported to be so powerful it almost knocks you down. "Babs" is the grandchild of Angel Face, and great-grandchild of Sterling Silver, hybridized by the legendary rose breeder Tom Carruth. He's done a commendable job of capturing the various beauties, perfection, and charms of the ancestors, combining them in a generous, elegant, and very striking rose.

This was interesting to me because we grow, in California, both Angel Face and Sterling Silver; I think we are both partial to lavender roses, particularly to ones that are scented. 

Having finally polished off some literary biographies started this year, I just treated myself to the new Updike by Adam Begley, Harper Collins, 2014. About, guess who?  As far as I am (Harvard) a lot of the burden of the story is about what a some of us might refer to as his "mother problem."

I love epigraphs, and each chapter has one. Here is the first: "A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror. --Sigmund Freud"

and the second: "What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked at random, shine? "The Astronomer"" [by John Updike.]

Updike began as a poet, with light verse published both during high school and college. His first book was a book of poems: here is an early poem published in Chatterbox:

Child's Question

Oh, is it true

A word with a Q with 

The usual U does lack?

I grunt and strain

But, no, in vain

My weary brain

Iraq

           John Updike

Sniff if you will, but were you ever published in Chatterbox???

And one more quote (then you can get the book)!!

From his memoirs, on the first meeting of Hyder Rollins's course in Late Romantic Poetry:

As I settled into the first lecture, in my one-armed chair, my heart was beating like that of a boy with a pocket of heavy nickels as he walks through the door . . . of a candy shop. It would be bliss. . . I thought, to go on forever like this, filling in one's ignorance of English literature slot by slot, poet by poet, under the guidance of tenured wizards, in classrooms dating from the colonial era, while the down-drooping, golden-leaved elm branches shivered in the sunlight outside in the Yard.  [Updike, page 76.]