Rosa 'Fair Bianca' & Hosta 'Autumn Frost'18 May 2021

When in boredom sometime in the summer of 2002 I tried scanning a plant from my garden (Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’) my intentions were about capturing an image with accuracy. I scanned them with 100% size and put the day’s date.

It was only after that first scan that I also became aware of the beauty. I also discovered that the photography of plants with macro lenses or simply the photography of a bush brings nothing new and that these pictures after a while all look the same.

When people spot the large inkjets of my plants on the walls of my living room they comment what a nice photograph it is. I tell them that it is not a photograph but a scanograph and that I am a scanographer. They immediately turn around and lose interest.

I have persisted and I have thousands of Tiffs of these plants in an exterior hard drive. I go back to many of the plants so that you can see what they look like on the same day years later or months later. Many of the scans are of plants that died or that did not fit in our smaller garden. Somehow having images of these long-gone plants is comforting.

Today Tuesday, May 18 2021 I miss my Rosemary and as I work in her garden (now mine) I become melancholy. I am trying to do justice to her garden by making sure the garden looks its best.

One of her favourite roses was the English Rose, Rosa ‘Fair Bianca’. It has been with us for at least 30 years. It is not a heavy duty grower so I have to cuddle and coddle it. Today it bloomed for the first time. I put my nose to it and I received hints of lemon, pernod, magnolia soap and something that the English call myrrh. It is heavenly.

In spite of my melancholy I was a bit bored so I decided to become less involved in scanning for accuracy and to do it just artistically. I combined Fair Bianca with a recent introduction in the huge hosta kingdom called Hosta ‘Autumn Frost’.

I like the result and so would have Rosemary.