Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher' & Hosta 'Midas Touch' - 8 July 2025

Rebecca Stewart

One of the most talented human beings I have ever met is my oldest granddaughter Rebecca who is now about to be 28. Presently she has lost her way. I have no doubt in my mind that soon she will be aware of her multiple talents and will become the stellar woman she has to be.

I began to understand that talent of hers once when we were in our Kerrisdale garden. She may have been 8. I asked her, “Can I blindfold you? I want to do an experiment.” I then cut 10 different roses and put them to her nose. Astoundingly she was able to identify all 10 by scent alone.

There is something about her gaze when I photograph her that has no parallel except with that of her younger sister Lauren. It is almost as they had Superman X-ray eyes.

Some years ago we watched Charlie Chaplin and Claire Bloom in the film Limelight. Lauren indicated she wanted to be photographed with Claire Bloom’s ballerina makeup. Rebecca performed not only with the makeup but did the styling. All I had to do was to click the shutter

Lauren Stewart

 It is for all those reasons that I think that Rebecca has that Midas touch and it is why I have scanned Hosta ‘Midas Touch’ with the rose that since I first photographed Rebecca with is now Rebecca’s rose.

Rosa 'Westerland' 7 July 2025

I have a friend who often tells how fortunate we were in having been born in that past century.

Photographically I no longer miss those long nights in my Kerrisdale darkroom. Ventilation was poor but I did enjoy printing my good negatives. It is a miracle that I am alive as I used a known carcinogen lots. It was called Kodak Selenium Toner.

Now in my Kitsilano oficina I work in daylight with no fumes. Often one of my two cats climb up on a chair next to mine and sleep while I write my blogs, scan my plants, photographs, negatives and slides. Few of my peers pay attention when I tell them that a well scanned negative which I will then print as an inkjet will have a lot more shadow detail than a darkroom print.

In short using the best of the 20^th century (film perhaps?) and combining it with the best of this century (my Epson P700 Scanner and my Epson P700 Inkjet Printer) provides me with lots of pleasure.

As an example today I cut a large raceme of Rosa ‘Westerland’ (which in my opinion smells like synthetic apricot jam) and printed it. Minutes after I printed it I took a picture of the setup with my Fuji X-E3.

Voilà!

Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' - 6 July 2025

 

I have written many blogs on the English Rose, Rosa ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ particularly since my Rosemary like it as the rose had our eldest daughter’s name Alexandra. Rosemary often told me that we had too many pink roses and that I should abstain from buying more. This rose was the exception and she loved it.

Today there it was staring at me with an unearthly beauty (where does that expression come from? It is certainly better that the present use of the word stunning). I knew I had to scan it and add it to the many scans I have of it.

Can something be so beautiful that one is compelled to action?  The bloom measures almost ten centimetres.

I went to goggle to see if some poet had written about the colour pink. One was Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni. Astoundingly I found this blog of mine that mentions the colours white, red and pink in relation to men!

Alfonsina Storni - I want you white

 The other poem I found was Emily Dickinson’s

 Pink—small—and punctual—

1332

Pink—small—and punctual—

Aromatic—low—

Covert—in April—

Candid—in May—

Dear to the Moss—

Known to the Knoll—

Next to the Robin

In every human Soul—

Bold little Beauty

Bedecked with thee

Nature forswears

Antiquity—

Gentiana cruciata 'Blue Cross' & Paris quadrifolia - 6 July 2025

Gentian Blue

The Magic Mountain 
 

Today I went to the unveiling of the tombstone for my friend Leah Patrich who died a year ago. She was in her 90s. On my way back home I did what Rosemary and I would have done together. Mandeville Nursery was on the way. I stopped. And there I found a treasure. There was only one pot of Gentiana cruciata ‘Blue Cross’.

Gentian cruciata 'Blue Cross' - 6 July 2025

Paris quadrifolia - 6 July 2025

I have written twice about the more usual gentian which is Gentiana asclepiadea. Rosemary adored all plants that were blue. I had first heard of this plant which grows well in Switzerland. As my other blogs will explain it all came about when I read a Chilean translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. And it was then that I knew where the colour gentian blue came from.

I brought my lovely new acquisition and when I was about to plant it I noticed one of Rosemary’s rare plants Paris quadrifolia. It kind of looks like a trillium but with four leaves. This paris had little flower with a blue centre.

It became obvious that I would scan it with the gentian and that I would write this blog.

And yes it’s her paris and my gentian. Two snobs together we were and somehow we are.

Kitsilano - 5 July 2025

 Two Men for All Ages

D.O.A. & the Man in Orange 

I first met Joe Keithley aka Joey Shithead sometime in 1979. Both his D.O.A. and Art Bergmann’s numerous bands exist wonderfully to now. Both Bergmann and Keithley serve as my inspirational mentors to keep at it even though I am 82.

At yesterday’s performance at the Burrard Stage of Kitsilano Day, Keithley and drummer Jim Jones played punk that seemed to me the music of right now. It was fresh even though folks in the crowd were mouthing the lyrics.

I can assert, even though I am an amateur, that the D.O.A. I heard yesterday, minus a bass player (definitely not needed), was one of the best two-man bands I have ever heard.

Keithley, who is a Burnaby councillor, has never let go or changed his views on what is right. He has been inflexible in the direction of the lyrics of his songs. In that last century we had folk music. I would assert that folk punk is alive and well in Vancouver thanks to Keithley and Bergmann.

My fave Joe Keithley song is his Men for All Ages which is all about the original cast of Star Trek. Indeed at yesterday’s performance, where I saw people of all ages, I was introduced by Keithley’s wife to their two very young grandsons who were in attendance.

Men for All Ages - YouTube 

We are indeed lucky.  

Addendum: This former professional is indeed slipping. My Fuji X-E3 camera informed me that the battery was about to go. I used my new Galaxy phone. Not one of the pictures I took with it were up to my standards. The five I took with the Fuji, until the battery went dead, had the only decent photographs. At one time, on assignment, I would have taken two cameras, one extra battery and definitely one extra storage card.

Felix Candela's El Altillo church in Mexico City

The writer here failed his starting career as an engineer in 1962 because he could not understand what capacitance was so he failed electricity.

Fortunately for me I continued studying philosophy with the eminent Ramón Xirau. I was not keen on Plato but since then I can happily state that I am Platonist. When I take portraits (people do not smile and my subjects stare into my lens), I feel the retracting (from the Latin to remove) of something of their essence. We cannot be exposed to perfection, so Plato stated, but we do get a glimpse of it. A good portrait does just that.

Fortunately, too, a professor called Chicurel gave me a good basis into understanding the calculus and its quirky infinitesimals.

When Leibniz and Newton independently discovered the calculus in the 17th century the first practical use of it involved killing more people.Calculus could predict where a cannon ball would fall with good accuracy.

Calculus, in showing us what the varying slope of a straight line looks like on a graph, brought us the now famous hyperbolic paraboloids sometimes called hypars.

A few months before Arthur Erickson died he was alone at a table in a function presided by Diane Farris. Nobody wanted to sit with him as he had Alzeimer’s. I went to his table and sat down. I told him, “Arthur, our mutual friend Sean Rossiter told me that you were influenced by Mexican/ Spanish arquitect Felix Candela.” Arthur smiled and for the next hour we talked about hypars and calculus. These usually roofs that show that when a straight line has a varying slope,the result is curved roof.

While I was sniffing in my bathroom yesterday I could smell the fact that I had to change the kitty litter. My Rosemary would have told quite before and I would have followed her instructions. I suddenly stopped and noticed her presence.

I don’t believe in spirits or ghosts. How can I explain this presence? Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 and minutes before she died she asked, “Am I dying?” I now believe, using a combination of Plato, Leibniz and Newton, that whiff of essence that I can see when I look into people’s eyes and which can be retracted by my camera does happen. But most of that essence remains in the person. When Rosemary died, her spirit did not completely go away. Some of it, infinitesimally small, has remained.

I felt it.