In my years of living in Argentina, Texas, Mexico and Canada I am always amazed of some of the language differences when I compare them.

In Mexico your marriage partner or partner is humorously called “mi pior es nada”. That translates to “My worse is nothing”. 

Here in Canada we are a lot more respectful and our spouse is known as “My better half.”

I cannot speak on Brenda Viney’s partner and give an opinion as do not know him well. He has always been a lovely host when I visit Brenda’s garden. While he does not seem to be a gardener I can attest  that there is no way that Brenda can handle all her garden chores (her garden is huge with very little lawn). Al must come to the rescue frequently.

Al has two other talents that I have been able to note. He has a very good taste for single malts. He has shared some with me. Al is also a damn good artist. Here are some examples. I chose to photograph them in my garden that is beginning to show a soon riot of roses in bloom.

I have one question. I wonder if Al shares his valuable single malt with her?

Stolen tulip 2 April 2024

Because I was born in 1942 I am a product of that past 20th century. As a boy I witnessed the iceman in a horse-drawn cart bringing ice for our icebox. I did not use a telephone until 1954 and I watched TV at about that time.

As a photographer I am verbose on the delights of Kodachrome and Ektachrome. I indulged until 6 years ago in having an in-house darkroom (I began in 1971).

But I have to admit,that while I think of that past century that is rosy now considering that I spent so much of it with my wife Rosemary, there are advantages to living in this one.

There is an event in my life that happened at the Vancouver Film Festival sometime in the mid-90s. I had to photograph two women, Barbara Sukowa and Jennifer Montgomery separately in the Vancouver Hotel Sun Room. I took their portraits with my Mamiya and lights. I rushed home to process the film. I then made two b+w 16x20 prints. I had previously ordered to frames with matts that would accommodate the prints. That evening, at the gala show, my two framed portraits were up. I thought that was a dazzling performance on my part.

Jennifer Montgomery & Barbara Sukowa 

Jennifer Montgomery

Barbara Sukowa

 In this century, without my darkroom I can take a digital picture, download it, fix it and print it on nice inkjet paper in less than one hour. Take that old-fashioned darkroom!

Those who might peruse my blog and read its contents, might know that I have been scanning the plants of my garden since 2001 and I may now have over 3000 of them. There was one plant that was not from my garden. My New Zealand friend (now gone) Alleyne Cook was working for the Constance Spry School for Girls (he was the only man there as he was the gardener) in London. One day in 1953 Spry told Cook, “You must please cut many flowers as you and I are going to decorate Westminster Abbey for the queen’s coronation"

Alleyne Cook

In 1961 David C.H. Austin introduced his first English Rose, Rosa ‘Constance Spry’. It was and is a multi-petalled once blooming rose that smells of myrrh. In my years of cultivating roses my Constance Spry never prospered. When Cook died I went to his garden and asked his widow Barbara if I could cut one of Aleyne’s Constance Spry roses. I brought it home and scanned it.

Rosa 'Constance Spry' 1 June 2020

But this was not the last time I scanned a plant that was not from my garden. A couple of years ago I snipped a tulip in a neighbour’s garden. I scanned it, printed it and rang the bell at her house. She was delighted.

My Neighbour's Turkish turban

More recently I repeated this and again with a tulip. On my way to a supermarket that sells British Cherry Cokes that my youngest daughter Hilary adores I spotted a lovely tulip outside a house. Returning home I parked my car and cut the tulip.

Fifty minutes later I was ringing the bell at the house where I had performed my steal. A woman answered. I gave her the cut tulip and my print. She was delighted.

I could not have done that in that past century.

Hosta 'Snake Eyes' & Allium stipitatum 'White Ghost' 9 May 2024

5 April 2019 - Kitsilano

When Rosemary, our two daughters and I moved from our little house in Burnaby to a large corner garden house in Kerrisdale in 1986, Rosemary was the gardener. My  little knowledge came from the years that I was a little boy in Buenos Aires and my mother had a long but narrow garden. When Rosemary and I married we moved to a little house in Arboledas, Estado de México. There she joined forces with my mother in the garden. I was oblivious and ignorant.

All that changed in 1986. The garden was much too big for one person to take care of. I was forcibly volunteered.

For quite a few months we had altercations. "Rosemary don’t put those plants of yours with my hostas. They are in my bed." It went the other way, too.

One wonderful day we looked at each other and realized that it was our garden and that our individual beds were mutual. We became companions in the garden.

The again we went through a big change. We sold the house, moved some of the plants to our Lillooet daughter Alexandra’s garden. We were then faced with the problem of putting in many plants into a small Kitsilano garden.

Both Rosemary and I loved our roses (they were ours!) so we put about 30 of them into large terracotta pots.

It was then, when not only were we companions in the garden, but we tried our best (and did succeed) in finding companions that would grow with the roses in compatibility.

Now that Rosemary is gone I have to rely on my own botanical judgment with these companions for the roses.

A few days ago I found three giant plants growing in the lane garden. I had no idea what they were. I took a picture and sent it to Alexandra. She immediately identified them as alliums which is an ornamental onion. I have no memory of seeing these last year, nor any memory of noticing Rosemary plant them. But there they are. For me they are a welcome revelation on how in spite of it all Rosemary’s plants survive against all odds.

I scanned the allium. For me there was something missing. From the beginning in 2001 when I started scanning plants my goal was precision of colour, showing it at 100% size and entering the day’s date. In the last few years I have become artsy and combined plants so that they are not only a scan of a specimen plant.

Rosemary would have agreed with me that Hosta ‘Snake Eyes’is a pleasant companion to the allium.

But I have to admit that if I am learning something here, it has all to do with that woman behind my shoulder forcibly pushing me into a long term companionship that has yet to end.

George Waterhouse Hayward

Often in this blog I have quoted Jorge Luís Borges that in order to remember one must first forget. It seems that while some people might think that Borges wrote about the obvious there is more here that meets memory banks and my fading ability to reason.

Borges also wrote often about visiting his old home (I am not even sure he actually visited it and if he did he might have been blind by then to see anything) and sensing his father amongst the smell of the ferns and the geraniums. I have included the poem The Rain many times.

The Rain

Because I am 81, when I turn off the lights in my bedroom, memories come rushing without stop. Sometimes I have to take a sleeping pill.

Last night I noticed something that hit home. In the last century I saw all those great movies that lacked special effects and explosions and had actors that had taken voice lessons.  Those memories competed with other "real" memoris. These memories were from before we were able to find out that Sharon Tate was not wearing underwear.

My mother and my father often took me to the movies. I even remember fondly, that sometime in 1958, when I was feeling homesick in my first year at the Austin, Texas boarding school, St. Edward’s High School, that my mother paid me a visit. We saw Raintree County together at the Varsity on Congress Avenue. It was in that film that I fell for Eva Marie Saint and had no eyes for Elizabeth Taylor. That film set my fate in motion to one day meeting my very own beautiful blonde, Rosemary.

What hit me suddenly last night is that my memories of my family, wife, children, childhood competed (share might be a better word) with my memories of scenes in films of my past. In some cases those scenes  were and are as much real as my own memories not related to movies.

I remember that in 1950 my father took me to the Cine Cabildo (an Art Deco design on Avenida Cabildo) to see Beau Geste. I remember it was a sunny day.

There is a scene in this film where our hero protagonists face Fort Zinderneuf  (Snoopy could easily spell that word). It is silent even though there are soldiers on the crenellated parapets. They enter and find out that all those soldiers are dead. This scene embedded in my memory.

In the beginning of the film, our protagonists, as children, play with model boats on a little lake. When I got home I went into a placard (Argentine Spanish for closet) and took out my grandmother’s mandolina. I cut off the arm and with a little pole I made it look like a boat and floated it on our bathtub. That evening my mother gave me a spanking.

And in many more recent films I can smell the chlorine as Burt Lancaster swims from one neighbourhood pool to another in the 1968 film The Swimmer. It feels like I was there with him.

Watching or thinking about 200: A Space Odyssey I find it impossible to differentiate any of the scenes from the fact I was sitting with my Rosemary at the Cine Latino in Mexico City. It was the first film we saw together.

But Beau Geste is more than ever in my mind every time I see my copy of my 1927 edition that somehow a previous owner shot with a .22 pistol or rifle. The illustration here is from that book. There is also a striking photogravure of author Percival Christopher Wren with a bullet hole through his heart. I wrote about it here. But only recently when I looked up the author on Wikipedia the photograph illustrating it is the one in my book. Somebody lifted it from my blog? Or did the previous owner send it to Wikipedia?

Beau Geste - A Viking Funeral 

Wikipedia - Percival Christopher Wren

Perhaps as I get older, when confusion sets in, I might not be able to differentiate between my life memories and scenes in films. Riding a motor scooter with Audrey Hepburn does not sound all that terrible.

Before 1970 I would run into hotel or pensions in Mexico that had copies of the National Geographic. I would look, especially, the American car ads. I believe that sometime in my youth I may have seen my first nude (a native perhaps in Africa). And I will never forget that the exceptional photos were identified as either Kodachromes or Ektachromes.

In 1970 in Mexico City Rosemary and I decided to buy membership in the National Geographic Society. I found myself bribing my postman to bring as many of those 12 issues as possible. I would on lucky years get 8. When we moved to Vancouver, to our delight, we would get all 12 issues.

After all these years I can report that one of the finest magazines I have ever read and read is National Geographic History. It is printed in Spain and most of the authors are Spaniards. This means that the shorter articles are about stuff that interests people who do not live in Anglo Centric America (Canada and the US).

As an example I am citing here the December 2023 issue.

 Where, would anybody find out that Danish King Herald Gormsson fought his neighbours and introduced Christianity to Scandinavia. "So what?" you might say.

 Let me quote the writer Inés García López:

Every day thanks to Bluetooth technology, people across the world can connect wirelessly to listen to music, check out a podcast, or watch a movie. In the mid1990s, its developer – Intel engineer Jim Kardach - was trying to think up a name for the new technology. Reading about the Viking history at the time, he was intrigued by a stone inscribed with runes that praised the exploits of a 10^th century Danish king called Harald Bluetooth.

My friend Ian MacGuffie is always quoting me Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. How can I convince him that my issue of World, that is not woke,  has a comprehensive article on the man?

 People who read my blog might know that I follow the dictums of Bill Richardson’s fabulous 2004 CBC Radio program called Bunny Watson which he would introduce a few themes that apparently had nothing in common. By the end of the program you found out tha twas not the case.

Bill Richardson

 

And so, Spaniard writers weave stories into their World that somehow may not have anything in common. But they do!