English Rose Rosa 'William Shakespeare 2000' & Hosta 'Island Breeze' 22 August 2023

Sometime in 1987, about a year after Rosemary, our two daughters Alexandra and Hilary and I moved to our new house in Kerrisdale, Rosemary informed me that we were going to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society at the Floral Hall of Van Dusen Botanical Garden. It was walking distance from our house on Athlone Street.

I was subjected to sitting on an uncomfortable chair and watching 100 badly taken slides of roses. It was then that I swore I would never photograph roses. But I did.

It was not until the summer of 2001 that bored on a sunny day I came up with the idea of placing a rose (Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’) on my Epson scanner. I had beginner’s luck and my scan was beautiful. Since then I have been actively scanning not only the roses of the garden but any other garden plant that I find interesting to see scanned. I have over 3000 of them.

From the beginning I imposed on myself standards. I would scan the roses (and other flowers) at 100% size, be very careful to get accurate colour, and to add the day’s date.

This continued for many years. But it was when we moved to Kitsilano, about 6 years ago, that not having a large garden imposed a room problem with our roses. With Rosemary we put many of the roses in large terracotta pots and tried all kinds of companion plants to hide the dirt under the roses. This worked very well and I am continuing that tradition with my Rosemary not around to give me advice. I am learning.

The scanning evolved to the idea of combining the companions in my scans. My favourite combination joins roses, hosta leaves and hosta flowers.

The results are a bit beyond floral accuracy and become artistic.

For a few weeks I have been thinking of the main topic of this blog. In social media, those bad rose slides at the Floral Hall, have been replaced by digital camera or phone snaps on macro. Many of these pictures are taken at noon which is not the best time to photograph any flower. To make it worse for me, rarely are these plants identified by their correct botanical name.

When people ask me of my approach to scanning I tell them:

“When I walk around the garden, the roses, especially talk to me and tell me that they look very good in that moment and that I should snip them and scan them.”

“I treat my roses and other plants with what I call botanical respect. Yes I try to be accurate but sometimes I scan roses past their prime as I believe that even then there is beauty in them.”

Identifying them with their botanical nomenclature and writing about their history is part of this respect that I have for them. And because my roses bloom and bloom, I know they appreciate my respect.

Part of the respect for botanical accuracy is that species names are always in italics.