© The New York Botanical Garden

The rejuvenation of spring. The bounty of summer. Have we ever been more ready? If the winding down of this long winter has felt like living inside the Yo La Tengo song “Big Day Coming” (And there's a big day coming / About a mile away / There's a big day coming / And I can hardly wait) to you, too, you’ll understand our thrill in previewing Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian Countryside, available May 6.

Like the mysterious peach and raspberry-scented rose upon which it centers, this understated and vibrant little book unfolds with a natural and transfixing passion. This new story by Andrea di Robilant – author of the acclaimed A Venetian Affair and Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, about his great-great-great-great-grandmother Lucia Mocenigo – grows out of the old, transporting the reader through time and space to investigate the identity of a pink rose growing wild on Lucia’s former country estate.

Whether immersed in today’s thriving subculture of rose aficionados and experts, or flashing back to vivid scenes of Lucia’s botanically inspired friendship with Josephine Bonaparte, di Robilant is a man on a singular mission. Unlike the early nineteenth-century “Parisian society gripped by rosomanie, a term coined to describe that obsessive new love” in an era when “establishing who introduced what rose and when seemed all-important,” di Robilant competes with no one. On his hero’s journey to hunt for the identity of this anonymous and unforgettable rose, he is carried along by a love of stories – those belonging to the thousands of rose variations he encounters, and to the people who cultivate and preserve them.

It's only in concluding the book, after traveling to places like Europe’s oldest botanical garden, founded by Benedictine monks in Padua with exotic plants brought back by Venetian merchants from long sea journeys, that he seems to view his own story in epic terms. “All along,” di Robilant writes, “I thought I would find the answer to the mystery of the rose’s identity in documents connected to Lucia or buried somewhere in Noisette’s catalogs in Paris. But an invisible hand had suddenly changed the script: in Mrs. Brichet’s garden, I had come across a living relative – a lovely pink shrub from northern Sichuan – that provided my Rosa Moceniga with a connection to its ancient Chinese lineage.”

Characteristic of his elegant style, that phrasing – “invisible hand” – is buoyed by a lightness of touch as miraculous and inevitable as nature itself. Its inclusion makes me wonder if, in writing about his rose-driven quest with a kind of aristocratic subtlety, he consciously incorporated the classic Hero’s Journey steps, popularized by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and interpreted by Christopher Vogler in A Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. For a reader looking for the key to writing powerful narrative, di Robilant saves this most revealing clue to his method for the very end.

In a 1988 Joseph Campbell interview with Bill Moyers, televised on PBS, there is a foreshadowing of this assisting “invisible hand”:

Moyers: Do you ever have the sense of ... being helped by hidden hands?

Campbell: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

For the best outline we’ve found of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey narrative, here it is as spelled out on Vogler's site for The Writer's Journey. Give it a read, and let us know: Where might you be in the story of your own quest?

1. The Ordinary World. The hero, uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware, is introduced sympathetically so the audience can identify with the situation or dilemma. The hero is shown against a background of environment, heredity, and personal history. Some kind of polarity in the hero’s life is pulling in different directions and causing stress.

2. The Call to Adventure. Something shakes up the situation, either from external pressures or from something rising up from deep within, so the hero must face the beginnings of change.

3. Refusal of the Call. The hero feels the fear of the unknown and tries to turn away from the adventure, however briefly. Alternately, another character may express the uncertainty and danger ahead.

4. Meeting with the Mentor. The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives him or her training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey. Or the hero reaches within to a source of courage and wisdom.

5. Crossing the Threshold. At the end of Act One, the hero commits to leaving the Ordinary World and entering a new region or condition with unfamiliar rules and values.

6. Tests, Allies and Enemies. The hero is tested and sorts out allegiances in the Special World.

7. Approach. The hero and newfound allies prepare for the major challenge in the Special world.

8. The Ordeal. Near the middle of the story, the hero enters a central space in the Special World and confronts death or faces his or her greatest fear. Out of the moment of death comes a new life.

9. The Reward. The hero takes possession of the treasure won by facing death. There may be celebration, but there is also danger of losing the treasure again.

10. The Road Back. About three-fourths of the way through the story, the hero is driven to complete the adventure, leaving the Special World to be sure the treasure is brought home. Often a chase scene signals the urgency and danger of the mission.

11. The Resurrection. At the climax, the hero is severely tested once more on the threshold of home. He or she is purified by a last sacrifice, another moment of death and rebirth, but on a higher and more complete level. By the hero’s action, the polarities that were in conflict at the beginning are finally resolved.

12. Return with the Elixir. The hero returns home or continues the journey, bearing some element of the treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed.