This week my Rosemary has been in Lillooet with our daughter Ale, helping her in the garden. I am going to finally pick her up this Sunday 14^th of June. I spend the days not wanting to read the repetitive articles of my NY Times and Vancouver Sun and I have been shunning CNN and MSNBC for the same reason.

Our cats, Niño and Niña must know something is afoot as they cling to me, follow me everywhere and seem to want to eat all the time.

Our garden has been seen by members of the Vancouver Rose Society so the only work to be done now is clean-up and the deadheading of the roses. It is about now that I must look at my once blooming roses (which are much too tall) and consider how much I should prune them. Unlike remontant roses (those that bloom more than once) once-blooming roses must be pruned after they bloom.

And, because nobody will be coming to the garden in the next while, I feel tempted (and do succumb) to cutting a large display of a rose like the one here of Rosa ‘Westerland’. I have many scans of this lovely rose (with that synthetic apricot jam scent) throughout season’s past and this one. Did I need to cut this bouquet? 

My initial reason for scanning our roses and other plants was a form of accurately documenting the plants of the garden. Many of our roses have died so my scans are a comforting record of how they graced our garden en gave us pleasure.

But more worrying is this scan of a rose with a hosta leaf. Is this all about accuracy and record? Or is it a futile attempt at being artistic?

Francesca Albertazzi & Rita Monaco - 11 June 2020

My Rosemary and I started gardening full time in 1986 when we moved from our little strata title home in Burnaby to our big corner house and garden in Kerrisdale. We soon realized we could not afford the local and excellent neighbourhood Japanese gardener.

Visiting other gardens was important in that we wanted to see how other people did their gardens and we would “rip off” what we liked. The garden eventually grew to be a very good one because my Rosemary was and is a perfectionist. Soon garden clubs and people from abroad came in buses to see our garden.

Things are much different now as we have settled in small deck garden. Visiting other gardens and especially those of the Vancouver Rose Society has for us a different and much calmer purpose.

In this virtual lockdown the idea of being able (if only for a short while) to converse with people who have a mutual interest (roses) is a very good thing. It is almost as if those gardens, as beautiful as they were (the two I visited yesterday), were of secondary importance. It was the conversation that topped my experience at Rita Monaco and Francesca Albertazzi’s garden as well as in Mary Irvine and David Macvey's.

Rosa 'Mme Hardy' -  Mary and David Macvey's garden

At the Irvine/Macvey garden I noticed hidden in a little corner a lovely and most wonderful petal dump! The garden with lots of varieties including old roses, and very new ones hybridized by Brad Jalbert was neat to the point that it reminded me of my Rosemary who in our Kerrisdale garden used scissors to trim and edge the grass by flower beds.

I will be sexist and say here that behind every successful woman’s garden there is a man. The man in question, David Macvey is the man who weeds, mows and makes her-and-his garden the delight that it was for me to enjoy.

The rose petal dump at the Irvine/Macvey garden

Rita and Francesca's garden combines the talents of mother and daughter. I never got to meet Francesca’s husband as he was sent away to shop. Mother (Rita) is a talented painter whose landscapes remind me of the northern Italy we visited last year. There are those columnar and very Italian cypresses in them.

Rosa 'Compassion' - Rita and Francesca's garden

Francesca is an able interior decorator. This means that if you combine that popular garden discovery of the 90s that gardens should have rooms with Rita’s sense of the artistic you have a garden that is smallish but full of detail (neat detail and well grown plants) no matter where you look.

In both gardens I was helpfully de-snobbed a tad. In the Irvine/Macvey garden I just happened to smell Rosa ‘Julia Child’, a rose I have snubbed because of the name. What a divine scent this rose had!

In the Italian garden I spotted a beautiful English Rose that wasn’t. It was Rosa ‘Compassion’ a Harkness rose.

I look forward to further delights next week.

It seems that I have a little obsession in my love for the trombone that is being pushed into making it a tad bigger by the appearance of two separate Isolation Commissions by Jeremy Berkman and Ellen Marple and one more by Marple for Early Music Vancouver.

Jeremy Berkman

Ellen Marple 1

Ellen Marple II- A Musical Offering

I have a new friend in Twitter who is keen on these two guys. It happens to be Tom Allen of CBC’s eclectic radio program called Shift. Some of us know he plays the trombone. Of Jeremy Berkman’s Isolation Commission in an underground parking lot Allen wrote this:

Ellen Marple’s two pieces, the Early Music Vancouver one with three different trombones and one sackbut is fabulous.

Who says that Vancouver is “no fun”? Mark Haney’s Isolation Commissions are now past 80 of them.

Nosferatu at the Orpheum
Jeremy Berkman and Turning Point Ensemble  
Musical Chairs At An Electroacoustic Hyper Turning Point Ensemble Concert 
Jeremy Berkman - Peaches and Cream 
Jeremy Berkman and Firebird 

In this blog I wrote about the most serious putdown I have ever received as a human being.

For the years as a Vancouver magazine photographer I knew that because of the hefty competition I could not rest on my laurels. I had to come up with new ideas and new techniques. And most important was the realization that if I made a single mistake I would not be re-hired. Perhaps Ana Victoria in Oaxaca was right that I was a human trying to be a machine like my camera.

Now in this 21^st century there is a longing for the simpler times, times that were slow (at least for those who remember that rosy past) and in photography there is a film and film camera comeback. This is good as we must take advantage of all the methods that are open for us in photography. But sometimes I believe that there is so much emphasis on the type of camera, the kind of film used and experiments with unusual methods of developing it, that one can forget the inherent possibility of the quality of an image if it is the result of cerebral (machine-like?) thought.

Many years ago as I was struggling to find ways of taking photographs of women that went along with 20^th century mindset called “glamour” I photographed Tannia. She was also the first to pose for me in the best room of the Marble Arch Hotel in which I began to explore my ideas of the eroticism of taking pictures of a beautiful woman in a seedy hotel.

In one of those preliminary photographs of Tannia I inadvertently took one double exposure. My Mamiya RB-67 had an almost foolproof device to prevent such uncontrolled exposures to happen. 

But happen it did to my delight (only a recent delight that I have noticed).

Perhaps it has all to do with the fact that as a retired perfectionist magazine photographer I have fallen into that comfortable niche of thinking that I am an artist.

As for Tannia, I am now aware how much she must have suffered in my bumbling. But she taught me lots with her patience.

Another double exposure

During the months of May and June and even after to the last days of fall, I walk into our garden to cut roses and other flowers to scan. It is a relaxing pastime that I started in 2001 and after so many years I have gotten the knack on how to do this well.

My relationship with roses did not begin well. Sometime in 1987 my Rosemary dragged me to a monthly meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society at the Floral Hall of VanDusen Botanical Garden. I immediately noticed how uncomfortable hard the folding chairs were. I had to suffer that while over 100 bad slides (mostly closeups) of roses were projected.

But Rosemary, as always, was right and I became a keen grower of mostly English Roses and Old Roses that eventually competed with my very large hosta collection.

From Vancouver Magazine art directors Richard Staehling and Chris Dahl I learned lots. They pushed me into realizing that there was always a way of making a cliché photograph fresh again. They argued that there was an alternative to any photograph that could be an improvement.

Rosa 'Reine Victoria' - Summer 2001 - My first plant scan

I soon learned that photographs of roses made me yawn. Some were badly taken, others using macro or close-focusing lenses showed the roses in isolation much like specimen roses in a rose show.

It was in 2001 that in boredom I scanned Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’ and experienced a wonderful beginner’s luck. Since then I have done hundreds of scans of every rose (and many other plants) that died or survived my garden machinations. 

Some of these roses like Reine Victoria are now impossible to find anywhere. Somehow having a faithful (accurate) scan of it gives me some comfort.

I have always believed that the quickest cure to a dead cat is a brand new one. We have followed that dictum for years. It has to do with the fact that a new live cat somehow has that essence (a Platonic Essence) of catness and we can discern in that new cat the memories of our old dead cats.

Could roses also have that Platonic Essence? As Gertrude Stein wrote and in this Wikipedia citation: