A Rose Day No.14

This is a plastic rose. It simulates the apparance of a typical Hybrid Tea variety. This one comes from IKEA. It retails here in Korea for 2,900 Won, which is about 2.50 GBP. I have one in my studio arranged in a wine bottle, and it is always in perfect full bloom!

For me,  the most poignant plastic roses are the three white ones that someone attached to the base of the lamppost outside our house in central France. They marked the spot near where a young man, late one icy night, skidded on the road, lost control of his car, crashed through our front wall, and landed in our garden, where he died. We weren’t staying in the house at the time, and the people who were had the terrible ordeal of discovering what happened. This was several years ago now, and for three or four years the plastic roses stayed loosely tethered to the lamppost, getting grimier and grimier, and constantly flopping over.  I would regularly prop them up again. But whoever put them there seemed to have forgotten about their tribute, and they never tried to replace the roses. So, in the summer of 2016, and after quite a bit of deliberation, I decided they had been there long enough, and quietly threw them away. Dust had gathered, the colour faded, the plastic decomposed. People forget. And time leaves its trace even on a plastic rose.