Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' 10 August 2025

 

Rosa 'Crazy Love' 10 August 2025

In spite of what Gertrude Stein said about the rose (it would seem she meant a red rose). to me roses are individuals so that my scans of them are rose portraits.

I owe my Rosemary my interest in roses and my obsession in scanning them. Every day I walk around looking for novelties. Today I found two roses, Rosa ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ and Rosa ‘Crazy Love’ which (I almost wrote who) have grown with a sideways face.

My roses surprise me wonderfully every day. Rosemary would have been interested in the scan of the English Rose ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ not only for its beauty but because our oldest daughter is called Alexandra.

Going back to Gertrude Stein I look at my roses not as one rose, be it red or not, but as a Platonic rose. Each rose, in its essence is one of Plato’s aspects of that world mankind could not see. This was the world of perfection. I think that now it would be interesting if Stein and Plato came to my house for tea and saw my roses.

What would they say?

Top - Kirengeshoma palmata koreana & Ligularia dentata 'Desdemona' 10 August 2025

 

 Gerald Bane Straley and the Ponderosa Pine

 Gerald Bane Straley and Julio Cortázar

A Kirengeshoma through a pinhole 

While walking in my garden I noticed two plants with yellow flowers that were quite close to each other. I remembered the name of one of them Kirengeshoma palmata koreana but the other escaped me. When Rosemary was alive between us we could always remember the names of plants.

I have written before how Rosemary did not like yellow in the garden. Her attraction to rare plants (who has K

kirengeshomas?) softened her stance.

The Ligularia dentate ‘Desdemona’ is called dentata because of the toothed edges of its leaves. The leaves are green but are a nice magenta on the underside.

That kirengeshoma to me has the face of a botanist from UBC who died of AIDS many years ago. His favourite plant was the Kirengeshoma. I will include a few previous blogs where I mention him. I had also forgotten that I had photographed the plant with my Mamiya with its pinhole body cap.

And of course the ligularia has Rosemary’s face on it. I wonder why its cultivar name is Desdemona as she was a tragic figure.

Hosta 'Invincible' 10 August 2025

 

It was in the summer of 2001 that in a fit of boredom I cut some Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’ and scanned them on my Epson flatbed scanner. Since then I may have amassed over 3000 of these images that I call scanographs.

In that 20^th century one of the then latest advancements was the fax machine. In this century, in Vancouver, it survives with lawyers and doctors.

My Epson Perfection V700 Photo is no longer being made. It has been replaced by a much more expensive one. None of my photographic peers have a scanner. At the most they may have a printer with a built-in scanner and it is not the same thing.

I keep telling myself that I am an artist and that my scans (I print many of them) are art. Most of the people I show them to usually have nothing to say. Perhaps it is because when you see one scan after a while all are the same.

One of the villains is this chap:

The first set of emojis was invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese interface designer working for NTT DoCoMo. He created 176 emoji as part of the development team for i-mode, an early mobile internet platform. These were designed to facilitate communication and add an engaging element to electronic messages.

There is a word that perhaps emojis replaced. People still verbally say or write “stunning” or ‘iconic” but rarely use “remarkable”.

That word involves saying or writing a personal opinion. Thanks to Kurita it is much easier to thumbs up it.

I am completely astounded by the scanograph of my Hosta ‘Invincible’. Each time I scan a plant, the result is a pleasant surprise. I may have an idea of what the scan will look like but that is not enough to the fact that I am delighted at seeing the finished result.

I am enclosing a photograph of the scan setup. One of my most useful devices is my mother’s ancient stapler. One of the hosta scapes (hosta nomenclature for stem) is affixed to the stapler with good photographic gaffer tape.