The high point of my Kitsilano garden happens when I open it for the folks of the Vancouver Rose Society and for some friends and family.

This year the garden will be open on Friday June 7 and Sunday June 9 from 11 to 5. I will welcome stragglers. I will have my special iced tea, cucumber sandwiches and my daughter Hilary will bake cookies.

The garden can be entered by deck door and also visitors must not forget my laneway garden.

Marc Destrubé some years ago when I was having my Picasso Blue Period

I have to admit that if I were alone in my house (not quite, as I have two cats, Niño and Niña) I would not play a Béla Bartók CD (I don’t have one).

But Marc Destrubé and his Microcosmos Quartet know something that has been plainly evident to me too, as I have gone to two previous performances in the quartet’s house concerts of Bartók’s 6 string quartets and also 3 of Benjamin Britten’s.

24 May 2024

What is evident is that music that might seem unlistenable in the comfort of your home has a pleasant immediacy when one is in the first row (my friend graphic designer Graham Walker and I always sit on the front row). By observing each musician, who often smiles in pleasure, I can almost feel that I am with them in their joy.

Last night’s concert, at The Amenities Room of Ocean and Lee’s residence, had outstanding acoustics. In particular, the sound (and the playing ) of Hannah Addario-Berry’s cello (a rich reddish brown) was literally music to my ears.

Of the other featured composer, (my Valencian grandmother would have told me, “En su casa lo conocen,” or they know him at home, American Ned Rorem, was another example of Marc Destrubé’s talent of being an educator. We were pleasantly educated by music that had all kinds of moments that were lyrical and not so. Who would have known that a composer would have been so inspired by an artist (Picasso) to write this piece of music?

I was so interested in this process that I found out that my Argentine hero, Ástor Piazzolla, also wrote a composition on the painter.

Piazzolla - Picasso

Please go to the link below of the Microcosmos Quartet as there are a few more concerts that will repeat this program in the next few days.

Microcosmos web page

And as for me, while I am no artist, I can attest that recently I have been having my very own Picasso Blue Period.

And for anybody not willing to listen to Béla Bartók, while sipping some Hungarian red wine, I can only repeat  what American composer Charles Ives once said when he noticed people making a quick exit from one of his concerts, “Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.” And that applies to all you women, and the gender fluids, too.

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.

Rosa 'Charles de Mills' 7 Hosta ' Snake Eyes' - 24 May 2024

The dates for these scans do not match the blog date. I am filling holes I left from a few days back.
 

It is increasingly becoming more difficult for me to talk to people as few are interested in my constant thoughts on philosophy, my melancholy over the death of my Rosemary or in any of my photographic experiments including my plant scans.

It is obvious to me that I am in a situation of waiting. The phone will not call for an offer of a magazine assignment. I am not waiting for that. I wait every day for a reason to keep existing. My younger daughter advises me to keep quiet about all the above as she says nobody will want to hear from me.

I remember that day in 1966 in Buenos Aires when at the Buenos Aires Zoo in my navy uniform I was sitting in front of the tiger cage (my fave) reading a Time Magazine that had on its cover, “Is God Dead?” I believe that they should have followed it with, “Is Philosophy Dead?”

My younger daughter further advises me to keep busy and find distractions. She is partially right as particularly now my garden is a riot of blooming roses and I want to scan them. With those scans saved in two separate exterior hard drives I wonder what will become of them? There may be over 3000. Many are roses that died and others of roses that I keep scanning every year throughout the season.

It was in 2001 when I began this process. At first I thought of the botanical value of accurate scans, 100% size, the date and colour.

I have large inkjet prints in my living room and bedroom. When people see them they tell me, “Nice photograph”. I correct them with, “It’s not a photograph. It is a scan. I call them scanographs and that makes me a scanographer.” At that point they turn around a lose interest.

I take comfort in American photographer Garry Winogrand who famously said:

 "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed," he said. "In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it."

I have fun doing my scans as while after all these years I know what each scan is going to look like I am often surprised.

In the last few years my obsession with scanning accuracy has been transformed by my doing scans not of an individual rose or other plant but combining them as companions. The results are accurate in execution but they have an added quality of artistic.

In this blog I found that one scan was not suffice. The rose in question, Rosa ‘Charles de Mills’ is a very old rose:

Charles de Mills Gallica Rose

Gallicas are probably the earliest roses in cultivation. We know the Greeks and the Romans both cultivated them. Much later, in the 1600's, the Dutch started breeding them, followed by the French.  'Charles de Mills' was introduced 1786. Like so many Gallicas, the blooms are often a mixture of colors from lilac to wine purple, but with magenta predominating. The flowers are large (4 inches across) and very double. In other words, this rose is a show stopper in bloom. There's no need to deadhead, it doesn't repeat, so you and the birds can enjoy the colorful hips come fall and winter.  'Charles de Mills' is large for a Gallica, up to 5 feet, and it suckers, so left unchecked it can easily get 5 feet wide. Give it room in the back of the border or as a specimen. Chicago Botanic Garden

Who was Charles de Mills?

Charles Mills (13 July 1755 – 29 January 1826) was a British Member of Parliament and a Director of the East India Company. He was the second son of the Revd. John Mills, rector of Barford and Oxhill, Warwickshire and educated at Rugby. He was a partner in the private bank Glyn's and from 1785 to 1815 was also a director of the East India Company, before becoming deputy chairman. In 1858, he was one of the EIC directors appointed to the Council of India. Wikipedia

For me what is extra special about this rose is that it is very thin in profile. It resembles a rose that may have had its top shaved!