In my longish life I have only owned two bicycles.

My first one was given to me by my grandmother in Mexico City in 1956. It was a Raleigh. My mother, who put the photograph here in our album, did not date it but my guess is that it was near Christmas as I was photographed with a Santa Claus and the instant picture taken was bought by my mother.

It was at that time, when on my birthday, someone insisted in giving me a croquet game as a gift. I thought it was a game for girls. But with my friends, we invented the game of bicycle polo using the croquet mallets and the ball. We played the game on our street Sierra Madre which was in the nice neighbourhood of Colonia Chapultepec. Across from my house were a couple of boys that played with us. Their father had been a famous army general called General Rincón Gallardo.

That Raleigh made itself all the way to Nueva Rosita, Coahuila in 1957 when my mother was hired by American Smelting and Refining to teach in a two room schoolhouse there to the children of the engineers and employees of the company. My mother taught 8^th, 7^th and 6^th grade. I had the unusual bad luck of being in the 8^th grade with five other boys. She was hard on me.

One of the privileges of living in what was called la Colonia Americana is that we were given horses to ride. My horse refused to do anything leaving the stable. When I managed to get it a couple of miles into the desert it would only then gallop home. I stopped using the horse and accompanied my friends on their horses with my bike. I had a special liquid in the inner tubes that instantly repaired the desert leaks caused by spiky plants.

Once I got married in 1968 I found that while Rosemary could do anything.One thing she could not do and had not done as a little girl was ride a bicycle. That would explain why I did not have second bicycle until 7 years ago before we moved from Kerrisdale to our Kits duplex.

I made one mistake in my very nice Trek Bicycle which has a rubber belt instead of a chain. I bought it (feeling very English) with only the famous (at one time) 3 gear Sturmy-Archer hub.

Of late I cycle one hour every day. Those 3 gears mean I have to put extra effort when I ride my bike on the steady uphill going West at Point Grey Road. I take my Fuji cameras and shoot pictures. I ride all the way to Jericho Beach and back. Now when I place my head on the pillow at night I go to sleep instantly. This feels awfully good.

My daily bike ride, and going around the block with Niño, have become something of a purpose and order in my day that still seems vacant without the presence of my Rosemary. 

In the mid 80s I took a photograph of a cyclist (he pressed the shutter, not me) that I am most proud of as this was shot before Go-Pros existed.

 https://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2007/10/today-rebecca-lauren-rosemary-and-i.html

Nelson McLachlan

Iris - 9 May 2025

Iris

by William Carlos Williams

a burst of iris so that

come down for

breakfast

we searched through the

rooms for

that

sweetest odor and at

first could not

find its

source then a blue as

of the sea

struck

startling us from among

those trumpeting

petals

In the last few days I have obsessively been scaning iris in as many ways as I can. Today I went to a house on Point Grey Road and cut an iris on the sidewalk flower bed. I returned two hours later with two printed scans. Nobody answered the door. I returned twice after but I believe that the people living in the opulent house must be on vacation.

In the past I have blogged many times on the iris. Below are links to some of them.

 Whispers of Passion

Squeezing the juice from an iris 

A slash of blue 

Rosemary's Angel Wings

Iris Art for Myself

Blue and lavender Iris 

Inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe 

T is iris sir 

Iris on my dinner plate 

Sweet Iris 

Iris

Lauren Stewart in our Kerrisdale garden circa 2014

 

There would have been vast advantages had I been a plumber instead of a photographer now that I am 82 and I think of all the stuff I will leave behind unless I throw it away.

As a plumber I could have told my two daughter and two granddaughters, “I don’t think you would want me to show you all the wonderful plumbing jobs I did in Vancouver and previously in Mexico City."

The problem is that I took hundreds or even thousands of slides, colour negs, b+w negs and in the last 11 years digital portraits of them.

What do I keep and what to I throw away? Many of my favourite portraits of them I have printed and framed, thinking at all times my mother’s advice, “Alex, a photograph framed is a photograph saved.”

My youngest daughter Hilary has been helping me file photographs as she has a better understanding on the dates the photographs were taken. I still have two large plastic boxes with negatives etc.

Today I sifted through them in a preliminary manner. I a slide box of of pictures of our Kerrisdale garden I found 5 portraits of Lauren that I took in the garden. What is amazing is that one of them has that extremely rare Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconoposis betonicifolia). They were very hard to grow but somehow we had them in our shady garden.

What should I do with these five? Had I not seen them I would not have known I had them. My granddaughter Lauren and her mother have not seen them and I am sure that they have no memory that I took them.

This is a quandary.

The last slide is one that I took in our kitchen and it includes the top of a glass vase. I normally never took this sort of photograph. I did. Is it worth keeping? That horrible word “legacy” is in my thoughts and the older I get the less important it is. 

Rosa 'Zephirine Drouhin' 8 May 2025

I have written about Rosa ‘Zephirine Drouhin’ three times. I have not stressed, besides that it is the last of all roses in catalogues when they are place alphabetically, that this is one of the few roses that is thornless.

From A to Zed 

Naked and Nude Observed 

Zephirine Drouhin & the priest

As the rose season begins I find my hands are a sorry mess. I just cannot make myself use gloves. So I bleed.

I would think that if you thought of Platonic essences that a thorn is part of what makes a rose a rose.

This rose is classified as a 19^th century Bourbon Rose. It is remontant (this means it re-blooms) and is most fragrant.

I find that I must scan my plants every day but I am unable to just post the scans without writing about them. In Spanish we have a saying “No hay mal que por bien no venga.” This translates sort of as bad things happen for good reasons.

These days I have been biking for an hour twice a day. I find that when I hit the pillow at night I am out like a light. Because my Kits house is small I store my bike in my office/studio. This means I have to move it onto the deck and then outside. Today without being aware the pedal tore off one of the lovely branch/leaves of one of Rosemary’s favourite gray plants. It is called Crambe maritima. I decided to scan it but with one of my hostas (one for which I have lost the label). I am placing here. I think it is lovely and I would only wish that some of my friends would understand that my plant scans are not always just accurate renditions but can be artsy or even art. 

Crambe maritima & mystery hosta - 8 May 2025

Top - Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' & Rosa 'Winchester Cathedral' - & May 2025

 

John Boyle O'Reilly

1844 – 1890

The red rose whispers of passion,

And the white rose breathes of love;

O, the red rose is a falcon,

And the white rose is a dove.

But I send you a cream-white rosebud

With a flush on its petal tips;

For the love that is purest and sweetest

Has a kiss of desire on the lips.

I remember going to public libraries and going through the card catalogues that often diverted me from what I was looking for to something much more wonderful.

In this century Google has surpassed the possibilities of those card catalogues although something the finding is less surprising.

Consider that today I had a squished Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ that was squished because I could not suspend it from my little bamboo stem so the rose would be not quite touching the glass (and not get squished by its own weight). Late afternoon I spotted a fully open bloom of the English Rose, Rosa ‘Winchester Cathedral.

 Dance & My Two Left Feet

And so I decided to scan them together. Then I went to Google and placed a white rose/poem. Luck was on my side, a sort of card catalogue kind of luck because that led me to a poem written by an Irish poet of the 19^th century that was about a red and a white rose.

To my further surprise the pictures of John Boyle O’Reilly resemble the likeness of my Argentine nephew Georgito O’Reilly.