Over the years I have read most of Virginia Woolf’s novels, and particularly her diaries, with their breathless ending.  But I hadn’t read To the Lighthouse. It was enthralling, and there in the middle, in a brilliant passage, are fragments of a poem more familiar to the Woolf family than the public. It is Luriana Lurilee, by Charles Elton, and the China rose is mentioned in it. Having just written on the plant collector Robert Fortune in China, with one of the requests from Kew Gardens being the double rose, I followed through in the attached piece.  The image shown here of the China rose, or yue gui, is from: Souvenir from Canton : Chinese export paintings from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Shanghai, 2003 247.