Bookish Gardener

Midnight, mitternacht, mezzanotte Monk

We were at the music store before Thanksgiving to get the busted A-string on my daughter's cello replaced. While waiting, I leafed through a book of Thelonious Monk piano pieces. As one of the pages opened to that song, the plume of its tune filled my head. We got back to the car, and when I turned the key, WORT's afternoon jazz show was mid-song with "Autuor de Minuit" by Les Nubians, a hypnotic rendering of "'Round Midnight" with two singers, gently syncopated percussion, and acoustic bass.

The week before, I'd heard UW professor Catherine Kautsky perform George Crumb's "Eine Kleine Mitternacht Musik (A Little Midnight Music): Ruminations on 'Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk", a nine-piece suite for piano. The theme is quoted faithfully as the work opens and closes, and the travels in between take you through sensations of what you might hear from afar, half-awake or dreaming in the dead of night: the sound of a mallet striking in a percussive burst; the delicate reverberations of harp sounds from plucked piano strings; a technicolor epiphany mid-work as Crumb quotes Debussy ("Golliwog Revisited"), making vivid, absurd sense (well, at least to me...I only began to appreciate Debussy after coming to it after being immersed in Monk); a ritual intonation of the hours of the clock in Italian, from "one" to mezzanotte. (There's much more than I could absorb on a first take, and I was just about to say that I was dying to hear this again, when the welcome news arrived via email that it'll be performed again on campus next week, hurray.)

I've got the obsessive enthusiast's fancy for the variation (Gotta catch 'em all!), whether in works that announce themselves as such, or when old standards are given new performances. It's satisfying to recognize the family resemblance in the disguised retelling of a work in a displaced genre, or to discover a new aspect of its essence as it's turned on its head (which is not to say that we shouldn't recognize and recoil from a wrongheaded adaptation as a wolf in grandma's bedclothes).

I came upon another variation on the 'Round Midnight theme in a roundabout way when I read Bart Schneider's Beautiful Inez this summer, thanks to this recommendation. I feasted on the book's, uh, enthusiastic obsession with language, food and music, but also was taken by finding the book's family home set in San Francisco's Richmond district, evoking by idiosyncratic happenstance my own fond memories of a summer in a sublet apartment on 36th Avenue:  being lulled into deep REM sleep by the lowing of foghorns in the misty night; dimly hearing the faraway barks of the sea lions on the Seal Rocks in the quiet predawn; spending Sunday afternoons in solitary bliss walking down Geary Boulevard all the way through the numbered Avenues, with Russian and Cantonese voices mixing in the air, or finding a deserted spot along the hills of the coastline from which to listen to Ella singing Gershwin on my mini-boom box while looking out at the ruins of the Sutro Baths.

But back to the book, which heads toward its conclusion with the beautiful, and despairing, Inez hearing her husband arrive home from work. He's whistling "'Round Midnight", a tune new to her (he's a jazz aficionado, she's a concert violinist), but she's drawn to it immediately. We hear the song whistled again as Inez's husband teaches the melody to her, and as she plays and replays it on her violin, we start hearing the song ourselves, as it goes into perpetual-motion rotation as the soundtrack for the wordless, beautifully wrought, awful end to Inez's story.

Although the melody of the song can be shaded in with any number of chord progressions, versions that simply take the dead man's walk all the way down the E-flat minor scale in the song's final measures miss the point; what needs to echo as the song ends is harmony in E-flat major.

The Thelonious Monk Quartet plays "'Round Midnight" here (scroll down to the link).

Once he called me into his room. The variations from the Opus 111 sonata were open on the piano. "Look," he said, ponting to the music (he had also lost the ability to play the piano), "look." Then, after a prolonged effort, he managed to add, "Now I know!" He kept trying to explain something important to me, but the words he used were completely unintelligible, and seeing that I didn't understand him, he looked at me in amazement and said, "That's strange."

I knew what he wanted to talk about, of course. He had been involved with the topic a long time. Beethoven had felt a sudden attachment to the variation form toward the end of his life. At first glance it might seem the most superficial of forms, a showcase for technique, the type of work better suited to a lacemaker than to Beethoven. But Beethoven made it one of the most distinguished forms (for the first time in the history of music) and imbued it with some of his finest meditations.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

...we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. [....] I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. [....] And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe).

The well-tempered pianist

Angela Hewitt performed here in Madison over the weekend, playing Book One of Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier", three Chopin mazurkas (Op. 50) and Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin" with astonishing and impeccable technique and insightful interpretations.

The concert's lucid program notes helpfully explained what the well-tempered scale is and how it came to be. Could it be that I might finally understand the "Pythagorean comma"? But there I was, getting all comfy, and now I learn that well temperament ≠ even temperament, with implications for authenticity rivalling the debate on Bach on harpsichord vs. piano. (As to which, by the way: Not Going There.)

I'll admit that I was drawn to the program for the Bach (and when I go to school on Bach, it will be via Miss Hewitt's justly renowned recordings of Bach's keyboard works), but the Ravel was a show-stopper, and the Chopin was meaty and profound, a revelation possible only with a performer that chooses to say "Listen to this" over "Look at me".

Angela Hewitt's web site mentions that her first recording of Beethoven sonatas is set for release next year (Op. 7, 10/3 and the "Appassionata"). I can't wait.

Two-manual piano Goldbergs

I have a problem. I can't listen to any recordings of the Goldberg Variations anymore after hearing a performance last Saturday that I don't want to forget. (This was a recital given by Christopher Taylor, pianist and music professor here at the UW, playing a two-manual piano.) I know my sound-memory of the experience will warp and fade with time, and I'm trying my best to forestall its dissipation.

The work begins with the Aria, starting with two notes on a high G. When they are played with deliberateness, you're made to stop and listen. On Saturday, the first two notes were played slower than the Gould '55, and less slow than the Gould '81. Did time stop? It seemed as though my breathing and heartbeat did. The rest of the Aria unfolded with elegance, precision and restraint, which are emotionless and cerebral words that don't do justice to the fact that by its end I was undone. And although I have heard the notes of variation 25, the Adagio, played dozens of times before, I don't think I ever truly heard it before Saturday.

Ah, what an agonizing craving. When I let myself return to listening to the Goldbergs, I'll probably do so by playing this recording by Angela Hewitt (who'll be coming to Madison this fall, with pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier on the program), for which she wrote her own (wonderful) liner notes.

More Loesser, please!

I've been a fan of Guys and Dolls for years and years, but I'd never seen it performed live until last month, when our neighborhood high school (James Madison Memorial HS, "Memorial" for short) put it on as its winter musical. The curtain opened to the three "gamblers" taking on "Fugue for Tinhorns"—and they nailed it. The show had a Nathan Detroit that could dance as well as he could sing as well as he could act, but everyone was adorably terrific (including the orchestra, which played smartly throughout). What a blast!

And the Mankiewicz film adaptation of Guys and Dolls showed up on the classic movie channel last week. I try to catch this movie whenever it's on TV, despite its flaws. Some of the best songs of the show were left out of the film (a blessing in disguise, probably, as I shudder to imagine Brando attempting "My Time of Day" or Jean Simmons doing "I've Never Been In Love Before"...'cause ain't neither of them can sing), and the songs that were added on for the movie are jarringly not great. Brando is a most peculiar Sky Masterson, but his scenes with Jean Simmons have great chemistry (yeah, chemistry). I mostly enjoy just looking at the movie—a brightly costumed fairy tale. When music videos in the eighties tried to cop the look, sometimes it worked (Janet Jackson, before she went to seedy, in her playful "When I Think of You"), and sometimes it didn't (the retro-Weimar grotesquerie of Madonna's "Open Your Heart").

My favorite cast recordings of this show are (no surprise) the 1990 Broadway revival (in which the women—Faith Prince as Miss Adelaide and Josie deGuzman as Sarah Brown—are particularly perfect) and the original cast album from the fifties (mmm, Robert Alda as Sky, sigh). The cast album from the 1976 revival that headlined Robert Guillaume doesn't quite have the same spark, and although produced by Motown, its TSOP-style orchestrations bring on a strange compulsion to Do The Hustle! And before the days when you could sample before you bought, I picked up a star-turn studio recording with Sinatra (Nathan Detroit in the movie, Sky on this recording), and Dean Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, among others, along for the ride. It's ghastly. Well, mostly—Sammy Davis, Jr. turns out to have just the right timbre and pitch for "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat", the only saving grace of this "what were they thinking?" production.

There's a curiosity in the lyrics to "More I Cannot Wish You" (link here is to a, well, unusual MIDI version of this song on the Department of Health and Human Services' National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences website [huh?]), perhaps the only song in the show in which Frank Loesser doesn't let loose with dazzling melodic effects. Although it's a simple tune, the lyrics include a phrase that for years I assumed I was mishearing as a hallucinated mondegreen: "sheep's eye and licorice tooth". Well, the internet to the rescue: an inquiring mind asked the question in the forums of The Phrase Finder, and got this answer:

In the original Frank Loesser score, the expression is "sheep's eye and the LICKERISH tooth." Loesser eplained how he arrived at it in a letter that's printed in his daughter's fine biography of him, A MOST REMARKABLE FELLA (page 109). The short of it is that he wanted a companion word that meant "covetous", fearing "sheep's eye" did not completely convey the exact thoughts of the guy who would be gazing at her. He went to Roget's and found that "lecherous" was a sort of synonym for covetous, but didn't quite like the way it sounded, so he consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and found that two archaic spellings of "lecherous" were "licorice" and "lickerish." He chose the latter. Voila!

[Original poster responds:] Many thanks [...] - I've been trying to tease out the meaning for many years. My ear always heard that application, but I couldn't come up with the "lickerish" thing. Thanks again - I can sleep easier.

Me, too.

Madtown Sounds: Thomas Trotter, Pleasant Rowland Concert Organ, Overture Hall

(Hey, where ya been? I've been deluged with the stuff that puts bread on the table, and don't get me wrong...let it rain, let it rain, I say, but thanks for your patience during the extended break.)

Overture Hall was sold out the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving for a solo organ recital by Thomas Trotter. Somehow, I managed to get a seat four rows from the stage. I'd been in Overture Hall before, up in the mezzanine, but this was my first (and probably only) chance to get a full view of the new hall from the main floor, looking up, back and around. I gawked; it's gorgeous. It's distinctly modern (clean lines, blond wood, metallic highlights) without being chilly or austere, and the well-padded seats generously accommodate...well-padded seats.

The recital was the culmination of a series of performances highlighting the crown jewel of the new hall, the Pleasant Rowland Concert Organ. It's quite a sight too. The pipes (4,040 of 'em) occupy the entire width of the concert stage, arrayed in sound-wave sine curves that form their own work of art even without emitting a single sound. The organ's received a lot of well-deserved publicity and soberly intonated accolades, but I love that it was borne of the fruits of a business started by an enterpreneur when she was forty-five years old.

The recital program covered a wide range of styles and sounds. (And it's left me with a yearning to hear the John Lanius "Switched-On Buxtehude" performed in Overture Hall someday.) Thomas Trotter has a commanding presence while performing, but was utterly personable and charming as he gave introductions to each of the pieces during the performance. (Also impressively athletic, swinging himself onto the organ bench, lithe and spry as a gymnast, before the start of each piece.)

The music from the organ is almost indescribable when, yes, all the stops are pulled out. The sound floods the senses, shuts down the left brain, and levitates you into another world. (Think Robert De Niro in the opium den in the final scene of Once Upon a Time in America, director's cut.) I think I need another fix...soon.

The concert ended with two crowd-pleasing encores. The first was an arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee with the melody performed on footpedal. When Trotter came out to perform the second encore, he told the audience that, unlike the other pieces in the program, he would not be announcing the title of the final piece but would leave it to us to recognize. Yes, it was familiar to me; it was the Widor Toccata. The last time I'd heard it performed live was almost fourteen years ago, when Thomas Weisflog played it as the recessional for my wedding...O happy day.

Ozu's Late Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Halloween weekend in Madison has attracted some unwanted infamy these past few years, although the partying this year seems to have been more Bourbon Street Mardi Gras than Devil's Night. Since I find that two's a crowd in most situations, there had to have been some pretty compelling reasons for finding myself on campus both nights of Halloween weekend. On Saturday night, there would be an I've-died-and-gone-to-heaven program with the Pro Arte Quartet performing Beethoven's E-flat major String Quartet (Op. 127) and the Schubert String Quintet in C major (D. 956) (two-cello, with guest cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau joining forces with Pro Arte cellist Parry Karp). And on Friday night, it had been time for more Ozu: a double feature of the films Late Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice.

Late Spring is the story of a widowed man whose unmarried daughter is still at home. He's an absent-minded professor who couldn't manage to keep himself in clean shirt collars, much less keep himself fed and his house clean without her care. Or is that the story?

The daughter's in her twenties, and if you'd ask anyone around her (especially her busybody aunt), they'd tell you that it's getting past time for her to marry. No question that she'd be a catch. She's beautiful, kind-hearted and selfless. And if you'd ask her, she'd tell you that she would never leave her father with no one to take care of him. Or is that the story?

Before too long, people conspire to arrange the daughter's marriage and to try to find a wife for the father. The daughter balks at all of this, at every step along the way. One day, the daughter and father attend a performance of Noh theater, and the audience includes the woman who is rumored to become her future stepmother. In an intense, wordless scene, we see the daughter's face as she looks back and forth from her father to the woman. Her expressions are those that you might see on a baby who senses the danger of being abandoned but who doesn't have words to speak and is too overwhelmed to let out a cry: confusion, then fear, then fury.

As events progress, the fledgling is gently pushed out of the nest. The daughter agrees to marry, and greets her wedding day with sadness and reluctance. Just before her wedding ceremony, her father explains to her why it's time for her to go, and she obeys. The father returns to the empty house after the wedding. Has the shot of an empty room in a film ever been more heartbreaking? As we've come to figure out through the course of the movie, it's the father that's taken care of the daughter, not the other way around, and in the final scene he pares an apple with a knife and finally, but wordlessly, reveals the full weight of the sacrifice he's made. The story of Late Spring turns out to be the story of how we come into this world, and how we leave it. It's the most deeply affecting film I've ever seen.

I would like to see The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice again. I was a bit distracted during its first half-hour or so; I kept having to take my glasses off to mop my cheeks from the lingering effects of Late Spring. This movie looks at the marriage of a housewife and her husband. Her eyes are dead with unhappiness; if you ask her, her husband is dull and "thick-headed". The movie's tidy, happy ending might have been too facile but for the character of the husband, who's a revelation. He is exactly the opposite of how he is superficially perceived by his wife and her friends, and the opposite of how we might first be led to perceive him, as a salaryman bent over figures with his slide rule and account sheets late into the night. When I see this movie again, I'll want to figure out why it is that characters break into song in several scenes, and I'll look forward to seeing again the scene in which the wife and her friends are dressed in matching spa robes, white splotched with black, like the pampered and greedy koi in the pond whose glimmering light is reflected back onto the women's faces as they toss bread crumbs to the fish.

Madtown Sights & Sounds: Madison Opera's Turandot

The Madison Opera launched its new season at Overture Hall last night with Turandot. For once, I was ahead of the game and ordered tickets early enough this summer to get front row mezz seats, positioned just right of centerstage. My husband was primed for this performance of his favorite opera, but I needed to do a little work to inoculate myself from my usual reaction to Puccini heroines ('oh, get over yourself'), so I spent some time this past week listening to my husband's vinyls of Turandot in its Nilsson I and Nilsson II incarnations. (As it turns out, I prefer the orchestra under Leinsdorf [Nilsson I] over Molinari-Pradelli [Nilsson II], but Franco Corelli's Calaf [Nilsson II] is the one that softens my frosty heart.)

The best word for the performance: wow. The David Hockney sets were brilliant, a cartoony hallucination of bright colors and exaggerated shadows. The Madison Symphony played gorgeously from the sunken orchestra pit (which fronts the entire stage, rather than being sited off to one side of the hall, and was nicely visible from our seats), with the discipline needed to give meaningful form and shape to the music (which is sometimes a challenge with Puccini, I think). And the singing was universally superb. Ted Lee (the tenor from Korea...paisan! sort of) sang a wonderful Calaf with powerful yet subtly calibrated emotions, and, yes, his "Nessum dorma" actually sent shivers down my spine. Barbara Quintiliani's Liù really stood out (which was no small feat given the array of exceptional performers) with a voice that tenderly drew the listener in. And the ministers Ping, Pang, Pong (Frank Hernandez, Joel Burcham, Matthew Lord) moved nimbly from comic relief to the brief yet beautiful (and my favorite) interlude of "Ho una casa nell'Honan":

I have a house in Honan
with a little pond so blue,
all surrounded by bamboo,
And here I am, wasting my life,
racking my brains over sacred books...

It was wonderful to experience Overture Hall for the first time with such a thrilling performance. But I have a bone to pick with Signore Puccini (or shall we blame Franco Albano, who completed the opera after Puccini's death): I hate this story. Turandot, the cruel, murderous, man-hating ice princess (a combo of the goddess Diana and Andrea Dworkin, if you get the picture), gets to ride off into a happily-ever-after sunset with Calaf, who suffers permanent terminal brain suction from the second he's in her presence. Feh. I'm not saying that Liù, the faithful, humble, loving slave girl who worships and sacrifices herself for Calaf, should have ended up with him, because that would have been bogus too. But Turandot's false and unjust transformation just...bugs me, and as for Calaf, I guess he never gets to learn that ugly is as ugly does.

Fall farm field trip

I tagged along on my kindergartener's field trip to The Tree Farm to collect pumpkins, popcorn and gourds. The Tree Farm's in Cross Plains, about a twenty-minute drive northwest of Madison into beautiful terrain. I am not yet qualified to pass the Wisconsin citizenship test, because I haven't achieved fluency in the geologic terms moraine, esker, drumlin, kettle, or kame, but the effects of glaciation are dramatically apparent, even to me, as you drive toward Cross Plains. All at once, densely forested hills appear. They're not mountainous enough to make you feel hemmed in, but have the effect of drawing a broad horizontal line that underscores the big sky. There's mostly farmland at the foot of the hills, which this time of year shines green with cover crop clover. And on the way to the farm, there's Indian Lake, which glistens in the sun like a soft-focus fantasy.

The Tree Farm is a working farm where visitors can pick their own produce. It's set on a ridge with stunning views of the lake below, wooded hills in the distance, and acres of farmland in between. The cutting garden was still alive with color from bachelor's buttons in several different hues:

And one of the farm's vegetable beds had rows of cabbages coming into their own, planted in a gentle arc:

The whole family returned to The Tree Farm today to load up on more pumpkins (90 lbs. worth, as it turned out), and more popcorn (I wanted more of the ruby-colored maize), and more gourds (although I won't be waxing and polishing them while watching the World Series, as Katharine White used to).

It was a stunning fall day today, the sky so cloudless and blue that colors seen against the sky punch out as if you were wearing 3-D glasses that actually worked. Red and orange leaves are the crowd-pleasers, of course, but the real wonder on a day like this is when you see yellow foliage high up against the fall sky...it's not just the color of jaundice and chlorosis anymore.

No wower

I pulled off the plastic name badge as I stepped out into the night air. Long day; time to crawl back home. Short day; already dark before dinner. I'd just left a meet and greet with a hundred other suits. We'd all stepped around the four kids in tails sawing at strings off to the side. No mike for the brunch music. My ears were still ringing from the the boom boom room, pulling out of the Kohl Center lot. I took the Bug putt-putting down University. I thought I was heading home. But the Bug steered right, into the parking lot of the big box bookstore, by post-hypnotic suggestion. I checked it out. No big book at the big box. But I spied a diversion. Ellroy of El Lay would be reading. Haven't read him. Why not see him. I joined the crowd. The chairs were filled. I stood at the back next to a big fellow. Canary yellow sweatshirt. Faded jeans. An introduction was being read. Tall guy watched and laughed. I tuned it out, waiting for the main attraction. I picked up and flipped through a book from the shelf next to me. The Quotable Slayer. Willow says she's tasted evil. She's asked what it was like. She says, kinda chalky. Good for a low-grade heh. Loses points with Kennedy in the scene. I looked up. Intro was over. Phil Jackson next to me loped up to the podium. Oops. That was Ellroy. Good reading. A little bit beat poet. A little bit Dr. Johnny Fever. I don't know from noir, but I'll give The Cold Six Thousand a whirl. My new copy's inscribed: "To Chan: Historical slash-out!" Someone tell me what that means. The Q&A was cool. Ellroy hates jazz. Ellroy loves classical. Ellroy gives a list. It begins with Beethoven. Ellroy goes for Hammett over Chandler. Ellroy says, Chandler wrote the kind of man he wanted to be. Ellroy says, Hammett wrote the man he was afraid he was. Me, when I read Chandler, I get stuck on him. I read Chandler:

The man called Costello shrugged his shoulders briefly. The red-haired man at the table turned a little in his chair and looked at Mallory with the impersonal air of a collector studying an impaled beetle. Then he took a cigarette out of a neat black case and lit it carefully with a gold lighter.

Oooh, I say. Do that again. An hour later, I'm still on the same page. And I haven't read any Hammett—hell, Hellman's man. But look what I find in the next Fortune Cookie.

On this day...

Graham Greene was born one hundred years ago. I first entered Greeneland over spring break of my first year in college, reading through novel after novel after novel, and more than twenty-five years later, the spines on many of those early Greenes have faded to illegibility. Almost any Greene is a good read—he keeps his plots moving with a deceptive ease, and his style is almost cinematic—when I read him, I tend to "see" what's happening in the book as the unfolding scenes in a film. But I don't read for plot, but for character, and in Graham Greene's characters (and even, perhaps, in Graham Greene the man) I think you begin to learn how it might be possible to love a human being of seemingly unforgivable imperfection. While I'd always been attracted to Greene's complexities and contradictions in a fascinated but uncomprehending way, things snapped into focus once I read this, from Flannery O'Connor's letter to Maryat Lee on January 31, 1957, from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor:

The best thing I ever read on Greene was written by an English girl named Elizabeth Sewell and was published in Thought. She allowed that his sensibility was different from his convictions, the former being Manichean and the latter Catholic, and of course, you write with the sensibility. Her word for him was Neo-Romantic Decadent. What he does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy. He succeeds so well in making it seedy that then he has to save it by the miracle.

And today also marks an occasion of a considerably more modest sort: I started this blog on this day last year. I think that at some point, long ago in the past, when I thought those things were interesting, I knew that Graham Greene and I were both first-decanate Librans, but I'd long since forgotten his actual birthday. What can I say? I'm pleased as punch that this bloggiversary landed on such an illustrious date. And as for this blog one year on, I'm happy to have found myself in this joyful commitment...so much so that I've even sprung for an intuitive URL. You can now find this site at www.bookishgardener.com, and, if I ever figure out how to rejigger whatever's not quite right with the domain mapping (without having to start from square one!), maybe someday soon you'll even be able to get here without the "www".

I plan to celebrate this Greene-letter day by gorging on two concerts of string quartet performances on campus tonight. First, the Pro Arte Quartet performs a program of Haydn's G major string quartet, Op. 77, No. 1, Dvořák's F major string quartet, Op. 96 ("American"), and Mendelssohn's D major string quartet, Op. 44, No. 1. And then the Takács Quartet comes to town, with Bartók's String Quartet No. 3, Borodin's String Quartet No. 2 in D Major, and Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. During the intermissions and breaks between the performances, I'll happily while away the time with Graham Greene's Collected Stories in hand.

The picture above is apropos of, well, not much, except for being a photo of a flower whose first name is Graham (the David Austin English rose 'Graham Thomas'), and whose late-summer blooming frenzy has now been ended by last night's first frost (yeah, speaking of anniversaries). When you hear people rave about this rose all the time, you need to understand that they are underexaggerating the wonders of this flower. The buds start in the color of a butterscotch dip-cone, then open to a yellow that transcends the name, in the Platonic ideal of a rose bloom that smells like a rose. The flower tinges pink as it fades, and the thorns are as beautiful as the bloom.