Taraxacum officinale - 18 March 2025

Taraxacum officinale & Helleborus x niger 'Honey Hill Joy'

It now seems only yesterday that Rosemary would arrive home from her office when we lived in Kerrisdale and I would tell her that some art director from a good magazine had called me for a job.

This was important as I felt useful. Now in this 21st century when a grandfather is just an old man for his granddaughters and the phone never rings my concept of my utility is all but gone.

The single most important event of the day (weather permitting) is to take my male cat Niño for a walk around the block. I feel useful because I am following in the footsteps of my Rosemary who taught Niño to walk without a leash. We take the same route and in my mind is the instruction from Rosemary, “Alex, don’t shout at Niño when he lingers in some garden. Be patient.”

During these walks, and the one today, Rosemary’s presence is almost tangible to me.

While walking on 8th Ave (a bike lane) I noticed a single Taraxicum officinale (dandelion) was in bloom. I decided that somehow I would find some excuse to scan it. For this weed to be in bloom and the only bloom in my walk with Niño for me was a real harbinger for our coming spring.

I started scanning plants from our Kerrisdale garden in 2001. My original intent was to record with accuracy the status of a plant or flower on the day and time I picked it. I have accumulated 3000 of them and I know that once I am gone there will be no perceived value in them or in my legacy. That is not important. What is important is that I have fun doing the scan and then mating the image with some writing. It is pleasing to me. When some people come for a visit and see a large printed scan on my living room wall they invariably say, “Nice photograph, Alex.” I correct them and tell them that it is a scanograph and that I am a scanographer. They rapidly lose interest and turn around.

I now have to admit that some of my scans have become something that is beyond accuracy and more in the direction of artistic. When I would at one time scan only one type of flower or plant now I mix them. In today’s scan I place that yellow weed with a bloom of Rosemary’s favourite Hellebore which is usually called a Corsican one. A few weeks ago it was very yellow. Today it was greenish. I think that both look lovely together.

In high school I used to marvel at looking through a microscope. Now my Epson V700 scanner is as good as a microscope. When I looked at the back of Taraxacum I saw beauty even there.

I scan my plants in the solitude of my office (sometimes my male cat Niño sits by me and falls asleep). I know that at one time I would have called Rosemary to see the scan on my monitor. She would smile as she would have smiled today at my combination of a very good perennial with a common weed.

As Argentine novelist (and nuclear physicist) Ernesto Sábato wrote:

"La fama es un conjunto de malentendidos, ya se sabe. Es vivir en una vitrina, y para colmo desnudo, porque no hay desnudez más genuina y terrible que la expresión artística, si es auténtica; toda obra de arte es una autobiografía, no en el sentido literal de la palabra, sino en el sentido más profundo y grave: un árbol de Van Gogh es Van Gogh, es su propia y desnuda alma ante nosotros".

 "That fame is a combination of misunderstandings is known. It is to live in a glass showcase, and to make it worse, to be nude, because there is no more genuine nakedness, and terrible, than artistic expression, if it is authentic; all work of art is an autobiography, not in the literal sense, but in the most profound and serious: a Van Gogh tree is Van Gogh, it is his own and naked soul that is before us."

The scans today are a Rosemary. They are Rosemary.