In our Kitsilano lane/garage door garden we have two moss roses. One is Rosa ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’ and the other Rosa ‘William Lob’. Both have that curious filigreed growth around the blooms which if you rub with your fingers smells like pine resin. The roses are fragrant but only bloom once.

Curiously to some but certainly not to me I think of a bidet when I look at Chapeau de Napoléon. It is called that because before the bloom opens it is supposed to look like Napoleon’s hat.

I think of a bidet because Napoleon had hemorrhoids. This was probably because of his constant and long campaigns on a horse. He traveled with a bidet and in his will:

Being almost 75 years old puts me squarely into the last century, that 20th century when most people worked from Monday to Friday and phones were black and you had to dial them. I lived in the icebox age and home radios were important.

In that 20th century as a boy I looked at maps that had sleeping Mexicans, wearing large sombreros under a cactus, Argentine gauchos swinging boleadoras, Chinese women harvesting rice while wearing conical hats, American cowboys on horses and perhaps for Canada it was either a beaver or a red uniformed Mounty.

The world is no longer that neatly predictable and ordered. You can buy sushi in Mexico City with avocados, tomatillos and chillies. Argentines, who used to make fun of Americans for chopping their meat for hamburgers, consume them at MacDonald’s.

For me there were women or men, boys or girls. Confusion started setting in by the time I was a late teenager in Mexico City and in Austin. It has steadily become more confusing while losing all that meant stability for me. There was Kodak. There were Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Packards and Studebakers. My bicycle was a black Raleigh. I took photographs and never captured them.

And of course only those who lived across the street ever died or won the lottery. I was immune to death and had plenty of bad luck.

As soon as I wake up in the morning I go to my Samsung Galaxie and look up what is happening in the Trump world on CNN.

It has taken me a few months to make our new Cruze shut up from warning me about narrow lanes and construction zones.

In that former 21st century my National Geographics (a member since 1968) avoided writing about conflicts and poverty. The Kodachrome or Ektachrome photographs were dazzling but you never saw what was below the horizon. There was no garbage and no disease. Drugs did not exist and the world was firmly heterosexual.

I have been struggling now for months to read and remember all the information in my January 2017 National Geographic which is a special issue called Gender Revolution. The lovely pink haired young person on the cover is quoted as saying ‘The best thing about being a girl is, now I don’t have to pretend bot be a boy.’ I am still digesting this with interest and fascination.

My idea of masculinity and femininity is now obsolete old hat.

In literature the rose has no competition even from the lilies of the field. On the other hand the clematis has almost no references in literature.

The clematis is one of my Rosemary’s favourite plants. I dislike how careful one must be in planting it or moving it as it is easy to break its stem and it will then be game over. Then there is the difficulty in that there are at least three types of clematis that have to be pruned at different times of the year. Clematis montana and siblings can if you are not careful bring down one side of your house while the wisteria and the bamboo work on the other side.

There are a few clematis that are indeed fragrant like Clematis armandii which  is much too big to ever grow now in our small Kitsilano garden. Most are pretty to look at and are scentless.

In spite of it all I do have a favourite and this is Clematis ‘Duchess of Edinburgh’ which is beautiful before the flowers open, beautiful when the flowers are open and beautiful when the flowers are spent.

Enclosed here is a scan of three (a fourth Clematis florida ‘Sieboldii’ has yet to bloom) from our garden.

Some 25 or more years ago I was teaching photography for the Outreach Program of Emily Carr (then called Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design). In this program artist/teachers (that’s what we were called) were sent to remote British Columbia communities for weekend seminar/hands on/classes in the arts. That particular weekend in question I went to a remote western Vancouver Island community called Ucluelet. When I checked into my hotel on a Friday evening the woman at the desk said, “A friend of yours has left a number for you to call.”

This was most amazing as I had no friends in that community. I called and the person who answered (she always had a fog-horn kind of voice) said, “Hi, this is Little Mary, Mary Arnold. How would you like to go with me to a Halloween party tonight?”

I went to pick her up. She was then about to be married to a pharmacist whom I instantly liked. Little Mary (she was and is 5ft tall) looked very strange. I had first met (and photographed) her in the late 70s when she was 19. I looked at her getup. "What are you dressed as?" I asked her. She replied,  “I am dressed as a Ukrainian whore.”

That was the last time I saw her until a couple of days ago when she came over to our Kitsilano home for a visit.

Little Mary Arnold by all accounts should have died many years ago as she did live a hard life. She could drink anybody under the table with her fave Grand Marnier.

But I have to reinforce here my delight, admiration and appreciation of someone I can really call a good soul.

At age 19 she had a perfect body (by the standards of the day and any other days). She had a preference for performing to Frank Sinatra songs. But what endeared her to me is that she also liked The Police’s Message in a Bottle.

Mary Arnold’s family has been plagued by tragedy through the years. Her two brothers (as tall as she was were jockeys) died before their time. Mary Arnold herself (her only vice now is 6 cigarettes a day) seems to be doing just fine.

One of Mary Arnold’s many talents besides cooking is her stupendous vision for designing clothing (and costumes) for ballerinas and modern dancers. She is currently hoping to get a grant to pursue this avocation.

One of the many moments of excitement is walking around and noticing little details. Some years ago (around 20) I used to go to American Hosta Society Conventions. Each of these conventions always featured a free convention hosta to those attending. These hostas, I believe are rare. One of them in my garden is Bob Solberg’s Hosta ‘Party Favor’.  It is not variegated so you might not notice it. The leaves are a mid gray and they are nicely ruffled.

Today I noticed the yet to open flowers on the scapes. A scape is the stalk on which the flowers emerge. There are those who say that hosta flowers are the least interesting feature of the plant. I do not agree. In this blog I have scanned rose blooms before they open. Those of Gallicas are particularly neat as are those of moss roses.

But hosta flowers can be beautiful before they even open. Some of the remind me of the Martian weapons seen in George Pal’s 1953 film The War of the Worlds or of little birds.