Bougainvillea glabra & Rosemary - 24 May 2024

Everything I do in my house from the moment I wake up until I retire for the night is a constant remembrance of my Rosemary who is not with me.

I could drink myself to oblivion. I don’t drink. I could smoke pot. It makes me stutter.

What is left for me, is to write about those remembrances. Somehow the pain is ever so less intense.

Rosemary was a plant snob. Or I could state that she was a woman with exquisite taste for everything including the plants she cultivated. She was attracted to difficult plants. She loved the challenge.

Her Bougainvillea glabra is not hard to grow in Mexico or Buenos Aires. Here in Vancouver it is most difficult. For a few years we kept it in the upstairs guest room. I did not like being there even though Rosemary coaxed it to bloom.

I brought the plant into my bedroom where there is more light and it is warmer. It is happy there. It started blooming a week ago. Since the window is on my right, and it is on my right where there is that empty spot on the bed that has Rosemary’s empty presence, the remembrance of her is strong.

I decided on an idea that would feel right and it seemed challenging. I would somehow combine my scan of the flowers with a photograph I took of her by a bougainvillea in our Hotel Claridge in Buenos Aires in one of our trips there.

I tell my photography peers and everybody else that a good flatbed scanner is one of the great forgotten digital devices of this century. I seldom take photographs of people. My two granddaughters, whom I photographed for many years, ignore me.

My plant scanning; particularly now with so many roses in bloom, keeps me busy and distracted.

The use of the scanner as a tabletop camera is a fabulous bonus. I am sure that some of my peers would tell me that with the use of layers in Photoshop I could do what I have done with my scanner.

But since I am a product of that past century I like being able to combine newish technology with older technology.

I printed my photograph of Rosemary in Buenos Aires. I hung the bougainvillea from the little bamboo on my art deco lamp over the scanner and then I curved the printed picture and leaned it against the flowers. I cut the white margins of my photograph as I did not like the intrusion of so much white.