In the late 60s while working at the famous English nursery of Hilliers of Winchester, architect-trained, Southampton-born , Eric Smith became its chief propagator. He worked in the walled garden for four years. He came up with new hellebores, bergenias, brunneras, camassia crocosmia, kniphofi and rheums but one cross made him famous. Most hostas flower in June. One in particular Hosta sieboldiana and Hosta 'Sieboldiana Elegans' are big and blue with thick leaves. Hosta 'Tardiflora' flowers in September and has narrow, shiny green leaves. Somehow one of his sieboldianas re-flowered in September so Smith used its pollen to fertilize the Tardiflora's pod. From this cross arose a whole series of mostly blue hostas called called Tardiana (Tardiflora/sieboldiana combined) grex.

My interest in hostas began in 1986 when we moved from a small house in Burnaby BC to a large corner garden house in Kerrisdale, a lovely Vancouver neighbourhood. There was a lot of shade. That is how I discovered hostas as all the reading material of the time mentioned the hosta as being shade loving.

When I joined the American Hosta Society and became a card-carrying member I went to the yearly conventions. I quickly learned from Atlanta resident, former designer of NASA launching pads, W. George Schmid that there was no such thing as a shade loving plant. He called them shade tolerant. Schmid wrote The Genus Hosta which is the the taxonomic bible of the hosta. He even learned Japanese so that he could study the plant in the wilds of Japan.




Halcyon - The Essence of Blueness 
A Halcyon June in my Garden

By the time we left our Kerrisdale house four years ago to move to our little garden in Kitsilano (and  formerly populated by hippies) I had amassed 600 hosta specimens. The large, rare ones I donated to the Botanical Garden of the University of British Columbia. Many others I took in a large rented van with our Gallica roses to our eldest daughter’s almost one acre property in Lillooet, British Columbia. It is a desert canyon in which the Fraser River flows through. In the summer temperatures can surpass 40 Celsius and in the winter it can be minus 30. The Gallicas and my former hostas are doing just fine.

When I had to pick the hostas for our present garden I sort of became a botanical Noah. I picked three hosta convention hostas, Potomac Pride, Northwest Textures and Party Favor. The rest of the hostas that compete with my Rosemary’s perennials and our 50 old and English roses are personal picks.

I have a US 'imported" (when "importing" was something that many gardeners did and never had to face the consequences they face now), Hosta ‘June’ and an authentic Hosta ‘Halcyon’ These two if grown from seed or anything not division become poor copies of the elegant originals.

In time I have come to learn that the juvenile version have narrow (lanceolate) leaves that curve inwards. As the plants mature they perhaps forget the Hosta 'Tardiflora' of their parentage and begin to adopt the rounder leaves of Hosta sieboldiana.

Hosta tardiflora 4 October 2019

Anybody who has grown hostas for a while knows that there is one important protocol to follow when admiring any blue hosta. You do not want to touch the blue waxy coating called bloom. The part you touch will revert to green and it will not come back until the next season. The same happens if you use powerful hose sprays or spray them with liquid fertilizer. If you happen to plant your blue hostas under a cherry tree stuff will fall on the leaves and you might have to gingerly remove the debris.

Since most gardeners plant their hostas in the shade as a photographer I can inform you that there is a lot more UV light in the shade and particularly on overcast days. Blue hostas will seem bluer and when photographed with either film or digital cameras they will seem bluer. Why?  Read here.

I find it amazing that with all the usual hoopla about variegated hostas the Hosta ‘Halcyon’ for me is the ultimate elegant one. Many hosta enthusiasts downplay the beauty of hosta flowers. Halcyon and the other member’s of it Tardiana group and the sport  June all have bold flowers that are beautiful before they even open.

For as long as I can remember holding a camera in my hand for the first time with an Agfa Silette I bought at a Washington DC pawnshop, my interest in photography has always been the human face. I have often told people that when I see a lovely landscape I buy a postcard. I will not deny that I have indeed taken landscapes, photos of sewing machines for Vancouver Magazine and that my camera has drifted down from the faces of lovely women to places that these days are verboten.

In this long stay-at-home period of my life at age 78 where I wonder if I will be alive to travel when traveling is allowed I have lots of time to think and few opportunities to pick up my camera.

I am not in the least interested in documenting sunsets or sunrises, Vancouver art-deco buildings, totem poles, full moons and new moons, skylines during the day and skylines at night. I have no interest in going to Chinatown to photograph a fading ghetto or to record the horrors of the Dowtown Eastside. I don’t want to shoot tall buildings with wide angle lenses or do anything more than snapping my cats Niño and Niña with my Galaxy 5.

And I will not waste my time with selfies.

What I want to do is to photograph faces. But this now is almost impossible. My two granddaughters, almost eager to pose for me I their youth, avoid me and even warn me not to take pictures on the few times they have come for a visit.

And so I scan the plants of our garden. I don’t tell all those people who have discovered the close focusing capabilities of their digital cameras or phones who are busy taking close-ups of roses and other flowers in neighbourhood gardens. I would place these people in a darkened room with uncomfortable chairs and force them to look at hundreds of these pictures. Melatonin would be whiffed in the air.

There is no way of taking a photograph of a rose that you have not grown or know with a digital camera or phone and make it look different.

What is the key?

The answer may seem crazy. Just note the title of this blog. And part of this is that our roses talk to me. They beckon even though they sacrifice being snipped. “Scan me now, I am at my best,” they whisper as I make the rounds of our small Kits garden.

I started scanning my roses (they were only mine then, now they are ours) in 2001. The purpose was to accurately record what they looked like at 100% life magnification and as accurate in colour as I could muster. Even then, as I was younger, I believe that I might have made a killing selling these as inkjet prints to hotel chains. But I I was not interested then and much less now.

The idea of accuracy has now been modified by my scanning of roses with other plants and other plants without roses. I walk around the garden and I am quickly inspired.

I may now have something in the neighbourhood of over 1000 scans in very large files that represent a record of the plants we have had, died or survived in our two gardens and the one that our eldest daughter has in her almost one acre property in Lillooet.

What legacy do these scans (I call them scanographs and I am now a scanographer) have in the very near future of my returning to my maker? Are they worth preserving? Is it enough that I exposed to great pleasure in the exercise and that there is a relaxing comfort in removing dust imperfections with my 17 year-old Photoshop?

I find that my almost obsession to photograph women in my search of Eros is waning.

There is an erotic delight in scanning this Rosa ‘Abraham Darby’ and Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snowflake’ today that is completely guilt free. The image delights me even if it is for naught.

The secret, of my pleasure is that I am taking portraits of my plants. They are no less people than my Niño and Niña.

It has taken 77 years for my concept of space and time to change, even after having read here and there about Einsteinian time and space. It all suddenly changed for me some twelve years ago when Vancouver contemporary dancers Emily Molnar and Crystal Pite discussed space, time and movement in my studio.

The shortest definition of relativistic movement I have ever heard came from Molnar (35) who said, “Movement is the observer.” This means that from a position of rest we the observers can discern the movement of a dancer on stage. Of time Pite (37) said, “The ephemeral of dance exists only in the present movement. We are left with traces of movements that are gone as they are being created. As we carve space with our bodies they leave a ghost, the trail which affects our future moves and informs the observer of our past moves.”

I then understood that those past moves are much like the contrails that high-flying jets leave in the sky.

For many years I have photographed dancers in portraits and dancing. I have frozen their movement with a fast shutter a few times but I have mostly opted for the blurring swirls that show movement more, than the peak (when movement is zero) in a studio.

On Saturday I read the obituary for Anna Wyman in the Vancouver Sun. This was an unusual one as it was written by her former husband, Max Wyman who was (is) a paragon of stable pragmatism in this century that seems to lack it. He is, thankfully alive but my writer friends Sean Rossiter and Mark Budgen are not. I miss them as I miss the very much alive David Baines and Maurice Bridge. 

In the last few days I have spoken on the phone with architect Alan James, Georgia  Straight Editor Charlie Smith and one of the few  Vancouver Sun writesr still writing,  John Mackie. These folks converse without ranting and do so with as much objectivity as possible.

All the above is just ancillary to how much I enjoyed (but in sadness, too) Max Wyman’s obituary.

Anna Wyman Obituary in Vancouver Sun

I went to my file looking for Wyman, Anna. All I could find was Wyman, Max. Then I remembered that I have a separate file called Dance. And that is where I found Wyman, Anna.

Not too long ago I read that space in magazines and newspapers is limited but on the net it is infinite. In the file I found four sets of negatives. It seems I photographed Anna Wyman twice. In the late 70s (when I took these photographs) I did not have the habit of dating the envelope containing the negatives and contact sheets.

I do know that the magazine that sent me twice to take the pictures was Vancouver Magazine. In those early days I remember a gentleman with long, leonine hair that frequented the magazine. That is when I first met Max Wyman. As to who would have written the article for which my photograph was used (of the early session only one was used). Of the second session which I took with a medium format camera I exposed only 9 frames (one roll of 120 film).

When I looked that the contact sheets (3) of that early session I suddenly realized that these were my first ever dance photographs. In a couple of photographs you will see Anna Wyman and Max Wyman’s son Trevor.

I believe that John Mackie may have called Max Wyman to ask him to write the obituary. If he did this was a brilliant idea. Both Mackie and I agree on the sad fact that Vancouver has a poor memory for its past. I have no idea how many people are subscribed to the Vancouver Sun (we are) so I wonder how many people might know of the death of the dance pioneer that Anna Wyman was?

My photographs while tactile (I touched the negatives to scan them) somehow felt like the above comments on space and time by Molnar and Pite.  They were fleeting. I remember having photographed mother and son. But that was it. I am a tad proud of the fact that my first photos of dance (Kodak Tri-X) are not all that bad. They prove to me that my memory, not really forgotten, but newly remembered in quantity did happen.

I feel lucky for that.

It was a bittersweet afternoon. My Rosemary and I hosted our family and we had dinner together. It was special, but because it was so special I remembered other previous gatherings that we may have taken for granted. The immediacy of this one (the first since Christmas 2019) brought that sad note that things are not as they were or should be but surely they now are.

Our daughter Ale arrived from Lillooet at about the time that Lauren showed up. Lauren had turned 18 on June 27^th and this was the first time that the excuse of the family dinner became a reason for a birthday portrait. I wanted to more or less replicate the photograph I took of her in 2012 wearing my mother’s red shawl. I did not push to forcing her to put on the Mexican top she had worn for that occasion. We put emphasis on the pose and expression. It was awfully easy and we only took five shots. But one should notice the almost impossibility of making the 2012 Ektachrome match up with the digital one.

But there were two surprises. In one (I have no memory of my camera shutter when that picture of her wearing her facemask was taken) the photograph serves to remind us of the times. The second one, I took forgetting to connect the flash to the camera. But my digital camera can take severe underexposure with digital aplomb.

One of the glories of being a photographer is being able to record the change of time in a subject’s
face.

The family portrait, as much as I would have wanted to not used facemasks, was much to dicey a situation so I self-timed it and we all posed as we did. But in late afternoon sun the garden was in a low contrast situation that I was able to shoot it without a light and we could go back inside and do what we rarely do these days.

To converse.