Saturday, April 13, 2013

Camellia japonica "Flore Plena Alba'

Of late I have noticed that I get next to no phone calls and the emails are from places I have purchased something. I need to unsubscribe. In this age of communication I feel utterly isolated.


I have further noticed that the media and social media have made an industry of interest in the obituary. This is a growing trend as death cannot be stopped.

Camellia x williamsii 'Donation'

What is interesting to me is that this on-line ambulance chasing is almost always low brow. Interesting to me is that the very recent death of Maria Tallchief a prima ballerina who was a muse to George Balanchine was not mentioned by any of my friends on facebook. Nor was any mention made of the great South African photographer Willoughby Blew who died last week at the ripe age of 105.

The fact that the world has shrunk has meant that a Big Mac in Vancouver tastes the same as one in Buenos Aires (in spite of Argentine beef) and that our media is all about American TV, films and music. Globalization is equal to a kind of “give me more American”.

I am proud to write here that I have never ever seen even five minutes of Game of Thrones which was the recent recipient of a devastating essay by Shannon Rupp on The Tyee. Gives us more Canadian culture gives us more Game of Thrones.

I regularly do not read The Tyee as I am not remotely interested in anything about the NDP (boring) or the Liberals (even more boring) or essays on US TV series, US films and other media. I found out about The Tyee essay on the Game of Thrones because there it was on facebook.

Perhaps my isolation is more about living in a world that I increasingly feel is no longer mine. I read that they will tear down the Georgia Viaduct. This is irrelevant to me. In fact I find the Vancouver Courier, which has featured that soon-to-be-even quite frequently, now even more boring than reading about our BC Liberal Party. We keep our Couriers to line our granddaughters’ Guinea pig’s (Penelope) cage. I still remember fondly the article in a Courier of the past that out scooped the Vancouver Sun on the story of a manse in the West Side that was serving as a house of ill repute.

More than ever my mantra has become Emily Dickinson’s, “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”



Today, a day of sun, showers and hail, I spent mostly in the garden, transplanting some roses, scraping moss from our boulevard with a spade and manuring my hostas.

Lauren helped lift a wall to wall carpet from one of the upstairs rooms to reveal a pretty nice wooden floor. There are two definite advantages to living in a neighbourhood where houses go down to be replaced by new ones. The new ones we pillage for piles of cut lumber (to end its days in a landfill) which we have been burning in our den fireplace as we watch Rachel Maddow at 6 pm. When these new houses are almost finished we throw all our pruned branches into their street bins, our large green bin cannot accommodate all the stuff from our spring garden.

I am not all that fond of our four camellias. They have no scent. They may look like roses but they are not. The only camellia I have a deep respect for is Camellia sinensis which happens to be were tea comes from. There are two camellias shown here. The white one, Camellia japonica flore plena alba came from a house that was torn down some 15 years ago which we raided on weekend evening. The other, Camellia x williamsii ‘Donation’ is a recent acquisition by Rosemary. I scanned them during one of today’s showers and then I reversed them in Photoshop.

It is enough to me to look at the reversed images of those false roses and think, they are beautiful and they have no connection to chopped heads or fire spewing dragons.