My Rosemary died on 9 December 2020 and today 22 April 2023 I am in no better shape that I was then about dealing with my grief.

When April began I knew that I would have to eventually write a blog about her birthday on April 19. I have written before how my official birth date on my birth certificate is April 18, 1943. I was really born August 31, 1942 but the event recorded later, so my mother told me because my father forgot. 

On the double plus side the bureaucratic error meant that I demanded to have my birthday celebrated twice a year, and most important it meant I could never forget Rosemary’s.

At my age of 80, with no financial worries and no obligations (except to walk Niño around the block every day, weather permitting), I understand philosophically that I am not wrong when a few years before 2020 I told Rosemary we were WTD (waiting to die). Distractions, and inventing ways to be busy, might divert you, temporarily, from thoughts of a statistically certain forthcoming date with oblivion, but the thoughts are there particularly in the evening.

I have been staring at the scanograph for this blog now for some days, unable to get myself to write. Today I decided I could no longer postpone the writing. I found a handle for doing it. It has all to do with this portrait that I took of Niño yesterday. I see in his face stability. He relaxes me and I know that with him around I have a purpose in life and that when I deal with Niño and his sister Niña I rewarded with affection and a sticky presence.

Niño - a paragon of stability

Why is this? In my 52 year marriage to Rosemary she was my Rock of Gibraltar who made all our financial decisions, and, importantly made us leave Mexico City in 1975 to come to this more stable country that Canada is.

It was Rosemary who made me understand that a glorious garden gave us a sense of purpose in the world and the hope every spring of a renewed life.

Most of all it was sharing everything with Rosemary that presented me with a comfortable idea of permanence (and I never considered that it would end as it did).

Now, post Rosemary’s birthday, I can look forward to going to the American Hosta Society Convention in Ames, Iowa in the beginning of June with my daughter Alexandra. Even there, I will feel a lingering sense of loss as if I were on a teeter totter with uncertain instability.

I would like to end this with a contrasting comparison of the term birthday in English and in Spanish. A birthday, in English celebrates that first gasp of air in hospital. Cumpleaños, which literally translates to “fulfilling your years”, puts far more emphasis on all the goings on after that doctor’s slap.

My Rosemary fulfilled much, not only for her life, but made it possible that at least this guy is WTD in the comfort of a home with two happy cats.

Rosemary's Mexican "bird dress",  is seen in the scanograph here.She wore it when we were married in  February 1968, is, all these years later, in perfect shape. The dress is much too small for my two granddaughters. Will the dress wait, perhaps for their children?  The dress, in all of Rosemary's stability, will have her patience. 

The two little blue flowers are from our Rhodendron augustinii 'Marion McDonnell'. Rosemary loved its blue flowers and almost like magic there were a couple of blooms ready for my scanner.

Alex Summers - 1995 - Horizont Camera

The plants in my gardens have faces. When I look at my primulas I remember my Rosemary who loved them. When I look at the roses, again they are all Rosemary. Why?

In 1987 when we began to garden in our large corner in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kerrisdale, all I knew about gardening is that hostas did well in the shade.  Our garden had lots of it. Years later Wolfram George Schmid told me that there was no such thing as a shade loving plant; “They are shade tolerant.”

One day Rosemary informed me that we were going to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. I sat down on a hard chair and was subjected to the projection of over 100 bad rose slides.

But, as always, Rosemary was right and our garden, in spite of about 400 hostas then, had rhododendrons, ferns, roses, interesting trees, dwarf conifers and many of Rosemary’s unknown to me perennials.

Now in my Kitsilano garden, a small one it is, I have no more than 45 hostas. When I look at them they may have the face of the hybridizers I met who were responsible for introducing them.

From Rosemary I learned that all plants must have companions. My hostas share the garden. Because of its compact size you cannot see dirt. George Schmid called it “shoulder to shoulder” gardening. 

I have had to amend the soil now for 6 years as there is a lot of clay. It was the red Atlanta clay that flummoxed George Schmid’s attempt to garden. Hosta‘Honeybells’  did just fine and of course the rest is history with the Giboshi Man.

When I stroll in my garden I immediately my thoughts go to the founder of the American Hosta Society, Alex Summers (my tocayo or namesake) who charmed me when I first met him at the 1992 Columbus, Ohio Convention.

There was something about this plain spoken (when you could understand his trademark mumble) erudite man that charmed me.

In 2001, on what must have been a hot and boring Vancouver Sunday in the summer, I looked at my scanner and wondered what I could do with it. I was much too shy to sit on it. I went out into the garden and spotted some lovely blooms on the Bourbon Rose, Rosa ‘Reine Victoria. I suspended two flowers over the scanner using a bamboo stick attached to the art deco lamp on my Edwardian desk.

Rosa 'Reine Victoria' summer of 2001

It seems that I experienced beginner’s luck because the result was lovely. Since 2001 I have now amassed over 3000 scans.

 I want to connect that first rose scan with Alex Summers.

The rose died a few years later as Bourbon Roses have a problem with our wet Vancouver springs. Somehow, and I will use the modern digital language, when I captured that rose in a scan, I captured a bit of its essence and soul.

Today while filing photographs and negatives labelled Washington DC 1995, I remembered I went on a job for an annual report. I had shingles on my way there. My memory is not sharp for some stuff. Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges said (obvious?) that in order to remember you must forget.

In one of the contact sheets where I used a Russian swivel lens panoramic camera called a Horizont there were two snaps of Alex in what must have been his Delaware farm. I checked the dates for past hosta conventions and of course there was one in Washington that year.

Finding that photograph of Alex, which I am now only starting to remember, is much like capturing Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’.  Alex died four years later. The Horizont picture and the charming  portraits of Alex wearing a beard somehow now make me smile as a I remember (I never did a Borges forget) a man who befriended my granddaughter Rebecca. She was the only one willing to sit with him in the bus tours in the 2003 Falls Church, Virginia convention.                             

Hosta 'Liberty' & Camellia x williamsii 'Donation'- 17 April 2023

This is perhaps the first time that I have written a blog (I have written 5793) that is expressly destined for Facebook. I am writing it for the American Hosta Society group. 

Why?

I must start at the beginning. My wife Rosemary (who had deep financial acumen) decided that we were to buy a large corner garden with an equally nice house in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kerrisdale in 1986. I did not have any knowledge in gardening and noticed that the garden had lots of shade. I found out about hostas. At the time immigrants were coming to our neighbourhood and tearing down houses. They would then build monstrosities with four and five car garages. As soon as the original houses were vacant and all indications that the wreckers were soon to come my Rosemary would tell me and we would go with spades and a wheelbarrow. In one garden she pointed and said, “That’s a hosta.” I removed it and not knowing what the large green hosta was it became Hosta ‘43 and Hudson’.

Hosta 'Liberty' & a few H. 'Sunny Halcyon' and 2 H. 'Dream Queen' & a H. 'Blue Angel' for my daughter

In the beginning she had her garden and I had my garden. She had her perennials, trees and roses. I had my hostas.

But I eventually saw the light and the garden became our garden and my interest in a varied garden that was not monoculture of hostas became a reality.

It broke her heart when six years ago we could no longer fix the leaky bathrooms, etc of our old house. We sold it and became instant millionaires. We were able to inherit our two daughters while we were still alive.

Rosemary was not all that happy in our little duplex even though besides the deck it has four flower beds and a largish one outside on the lane since we do no use our garage as a garage.

She died on December 9, 2020 and my life has not been a happy one since. Because we had been married 52 years and I am now 80, my time with her was a big chunk in my existence.

I take photographs; I write my blog and walk my male cat Niño. His sister Niña is not so daring. I tell people as a joke that I am considering becoming a trans-woman so that I can be an authentic cat lady.

Niña and Niño

I am saved of further grief by my two daughters. The older one, Alexandra (who will accompany me to the Ames convention) lives far in the town of Lillooet in the interior of British Columbia. She is a gardener and has a one acre property. The town is the hottest spot in Canada in the summer with temperatures reaching 41 Celsius. In the winter it can reach -32 Celsius but is almost a dry desert. It is in her garden that my hardy Gallica roses went to. Also there are all my large hostas. She has many hostas that seem to do well in spite of the terrible conditions. Last year I gave Olga Petryszyn’s H. ‘Coast to Coast’. I am sure it will adapt just fine to the conditions there.

Rosemary and Ale in Lillooet

My other daughter Hilary (who accompanied me to the Minneapolis convention) lives in Vancouver and I see her at least twice a week. She smiles lot and calls me every day.

Hilary Stewart & Alex at Minneapolis Hosta Convention - Photograph by Janet Mills - the  crying baby is Hilary as a little girl.

 

Now, to the reason for this blog. Ale (Alexandra) strongly pressured me to enter the American Hosta Society FB group. She was right and now I am happy doing stuff so that I can contribute to this fine group.

In my native Argentina we have a saying that the devil knows more not because he is the devil but because he is an old man. I may know some stuff.

Here in Vancouver, until recently, we had many of those 19^th century English defined ‘amateur gardeners’. My wife made me join the Vancouver Rose Society, the Alpine Garden Club and we were friends with the amateurs who were experts in rhododendrons, magnolias, ferns, roses but nobody really knew much about hostas so I became the hosta man.

Rosemary was a Master Gardener and when she retired she worked in the Shop in the Garden of the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and was a guide at the VanDusen Botanical Garden.

Thanks to Rosemary I am a well rounded (but thinnish) gardener.

And so here I am. Thank you all for taking me in.

The first photograph of Hosta 'Liberty' and Camellia x williamsii 'Donation' I photographed today for two reasons. Camellia 'Donation' was Rosemary's favourite camellia. And I would like to point out that Liberty does not mind being pot bound.

In the second photo with Hosta 'Liberty' are these bunch of Hosta 'Sunny Halcyon' I did not know existed until I saw them in a nursery last week.

In the third photograph you can see my Rosemary with Ale and behind them the Lillooet garden.

Retiro - Buenos Aires

Since I have a memory for anything I can remember the trains of my life. As a little boy my father and my mother (or my grandmother) would take me on a train from the station in Martínez and later Coghlan to the cavernous downtown Retiro Station. From there, without leaving the station, we took the escalators down to the subte (the subway) to the Lavalle Station that had two blocks of movie theaters to movie theaters.

From kindergarten on my mother and I boarded the train to Belgrano R where her American High School was. It was not far from my grammar school.

When I returned to Buenos Aires for my military service in the Argentine Navy in 1965 I lived on a pension in the Beccar Station. This train and all the above where on the line of Bartolomé Mitre.

When I arrived at Retiro from Beccar I had made friends with the station master who would write me a letter saying that my train had arrive 45 minutes late. I would then retire to have a desayuno complete in the lovely Retiro Station tea room. Cabo Moraña at the office would smile when I arrived late. I am sure he suspected of my triquiñuela but he was a good guy even though he was in the more serious Infantes de Marina (Marine Corps).

In Mexico I remember that Rosemary went on a train to Oaxaca and the curves made me very dizzy.

In Vancouver I had no real experience in riding trains. I liked to go to the downtown CP Station and I would sit on a bench and imagine my grandmother, my mother, aunt and uncle crossing it on their way to Montreal and NY City. They had arrived in the late 20s in a Japanese ship from Manila. My grandmother often told me of “Un lugar con montañas y bosques llamado Vancoover.”

In my contract job for Canadian Pacific Ltd. I photographed tons of cargo trains, locomotives and cars, and even the last caboose that arrived in Vancouver. CP wanted to give as gifts large photographs of a train crossing a bridge over a river surrounded by mountains, forests, the Japanese car companies. I found a location near Lytton where the CP tracks crossed from one side of the Fraser Canyon to the other. I was given a walkie talkie and for a few minutes I had the power to stop a train informing the engineer when the Toyotas, Datsuns or Mazdas where visible on the bridge.

A lasting memory of mine is seeing the many white morning glories that grew along the side of the tracks of the Buenos Aires trains. I also remember that the ticket man had a personal punch, all his own, when he punched my ticket. I can remember the smell of a combination of train brake linings, rust and a tad of human urine.  It was at the Belgrano R station where I got off one day, sometime in 195, when I saw my first sign at a drink post advertising 7-Up.

Now at my age of 80 when I turn off the lights, and when I dream, I have visions of all the people from my past that somehow I met, knew, loved and liked. They appear randomly in my memory. It could be my grandmother or my childhood friend Mario, or my Vancouver friends Sean Rossiter, Mark Budgen and Abraham Rogatnick. I remember my friends and mentors, Brothers of Holy Cross in Austin, Texas. I remember all the writers I worked with for Vancouver Magazine. I even remember their voices. I have visions of all the girls I admired but was too shy to approach parade by my memory. I remember all the cats that Rosemary and I had.

These memories are fleeting and they remind me of a Star Trek episode The Mark of Gideon that Rosemary and I saw in Mexico City on our primitive TV in 1970. In it the Enterprise arrives at an overpopulated planet. I have this lasting obsessive vision of Captain James Tiberius Kirk being in a room with a window. Behind the window was an unceasing parade of people in hoods that had to move as there was no place to stay.

This vision contrasts with another dream I have. I get on my train in Coghlan on route to Retiro. At each station people get off. When my train arrives at Retiro I am the only passenger.