In the beginning of November 1967 I had just finished my two year obligatory conscription in the Argentine Navy. An admiral had found me passage in an Argentine merchant marine ship ELMA called Río Aguapey.

I was summoned by my Aunt Sara Álvarez de Lopez Colodrero de Irureta Goyena to her house on Larreta123. She had been married to my mother’s brother Antonio. They had a son, Jorge Wenceslao who was and is a fave cousin of mine.

I sat down in front of the beautiful woman who did not have the normal Buenos Aires accent. She was from the Province of Corrientes. Curiously Corrientes is the only province where they play the accordion instead of the bandonón.

She told me that because I would be going on a slow ship up Brazil and all the way to Veracruz, México that I would need protection. She presented me with an Italian switchblade that in Spanish is called a sevillana (from Seville). She then explained that she had communist tendencies and handed me a poetry book, Sóngoro Cosongo by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén.

It was this book that I read many times on my slow boat to Veracruz that made me note that Jorge Luís Borges was not the only poet around. Guillén even pioneered the invention of words to make them sound Cuban and was one of the first to write about a proud white man whose grandmother was not. The only poem, An Ode To Stalin is the only anomaly in this fabulous book that I had bound in leather by a French book binder in Mexico City.

I keep the switchblade in my oficina drawer as a memory of the fine woman and not for protection. A couple of years ago the knife stopped working. My resourceful camera repairman, Horst Wenzel had it opening most quickly. Today I oiled it. It really opens fast!

Because I knew that I was going to write this I can repeat what I repeat to so many deaf ears how wonderful it is to arrange the book, the knife and the album with Tía Sarita’s photograph.

My mother in 1950 hired a photographer to take the family photographs in our Coghlan garden. The album to this day is in perfect condition.

Hosta 'Forbidden Fruit' &  Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha' - 12 August 2025

 

Traditionally Adam and Eve were given the task of naming the plants and animals in Paradise. I am sure that they did not name the apple that they should have not eaten.

Since then, we humans have the obligation and or pleasure of naming.

Because my middle name was Alejandro, Rosemary said we had to name our first daughter Alexandra. While in Mexico City her friends, and everybody else, shortened her name to Ale (pronounced Ah-leh). The name persisted to this day.

In the case of our second daughter, my Rosemary told me she wanted to find an epicene name and called her Hilary. By epicene, my proto-feminist wife told me that it would be up to our daughter to impose gender on her name.

Since Rosemary gently pushed me into gardening in 1986 she insisted I learn all the correct botanical names for our garden plants. When plants are hybridized or on their own grow differently, those people involved give the plants a cultivar name. Thus an oak leafed hydrangea is a Hydrangea quercifolia. Both have to be put into italics. So it is Hydrangea quercifolia. The one in my garden is a cultivar called Snowflake. The then correct name is Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snowflake’ The cultivar name is always between single quotes and not italicized.

With that all out of the way I will now write about today’s scan of two plants. One is Hosta ‘Forbidden Fruit’ and the other is Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Ayesha’.

When we had our Kerrisdale garden we had 37 different varieties of hydrangea cultivars and species and 500 hostas. When we moved to Kitsilano something “had to give”. We brought three hydrangeas and 50 hostas.

This hydrangea is not a normal, everyday mop head. Each floret looks like a teacup. And as it ages during the season (now), it changes into an assortment of different colours. I chose the blue one.

The hosta  unlike some of my other hostas right now is pristine and lovely.

My only addition to my blog here is that the chap who named it must have been thinking of Adam and Eve and apples.

Hosta 'Forbidden Fruit' was hybridized by Marco Fransen. He discovered it as a tetraploid sport of 'Orange Marmalade' through induced mutation using colchicine at a research facility in Ter Aar, Netherlands. The discovery was made in October 2008.

As for Ayesha:

In English literature, "Ayesha" is most prominently known as the name of the powerful and immortal queen featured in H. Rider Haggard's novels, She and Ayesha: The Return of She. She is also referred to as "She-who-must-be-obeyed". The name itself is of Arabic origin and is associated with Muhammad's wife, Aisha. In Haggard's works, Ayesha is depicted as a sorceress who has achieved immortality through the Pillar of Fire.

Rosa sericia ssp. omeiensis Var. pteracantha & Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher'12 August 2025

Species roses or wild roses have five petals. One exception is my very vigorous Rosa sericea ssp. omeiensis Var. pteracantha. It blooms on May 1 well before any of my other roses. In the fall it has huge red prickles (thorns are not the correct botanical name). Because it is a species rose it only blooms once in the season unlike my many remontant roses (that’s the correct botanical nomenclature for roses that bloom more than once). Today as I was taking all my green stuff to the green garbage container (it was garbage pickup day) I noticed, to my pleasant surprise, that there were two little blooms.

The other surprise is somewhat bitter. I first brought into our Kerrisdale garden the single tea rose (and yes it has five petals Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher’ 20 years ago. Rosemary did not like yellow in her garden. She did not smile when I brought her home. As soon as she saw my portrait of our then 8-year-old granddaughter Rebecca, wearing a sailor dress, and with a Mrs. Oakley Fisher in her hair, it became her and my favourite rose. Through the years it has come and gone. It is not an easy rose. A couple of years ago I purchased two of them from Rogue Valley Roses in Oregon. One survived and it is healthy.

I should have scanned it yesterday when it was at its best. Today one of the petals fell off. I propped it up for the scan.

My granddaughter has presently lost her way. I believe that this blooming Mrs. Oakley Fisher is a harbinger that she will be soon back and be who she was and will be.

Alexandra - 1997

Filomena Cristeta de Irureta Goyena Hayward - 1970

I disagree with Captain Beefheart’s lyric from Ashtray Hearts -Somebody’s had too much to think. Living alone with two brother and sister cats, and having as the only obligations to feed them and tidy up the house, leaves me with lots of time to think.

From my bed I can see the portrait of my eldest daughter wearing my mother’s silk blue Mandarin coat given to her by her old flame in Manila in the mid 30s.

Thinking about the portrait and knowing that my mother wrote a poem about that coat it occurred to me that as a portrait photographer many of my memories are based on photographs from my family album and then of all those countless photographs I have taken of the family for so many years.

 I ask myself, “Is a memory based on a photograph, particularly one that I took, any different from those who rarely took any pictures or none at all? Is my memory of a person sharp like a photograph?

And when I think, as an example, of my father, is that image one from our family album? When I was in Buenos Aires in 1965 I would visit my father on weekends. I have no memory of what we talked about. My memory of those three months pop in my head as a portrait I took of him with his friends on Carabobo Street leaning on a Morris Oxford. 

Does that make me different? What would Captain Beefheart say?

Too Much to Think 

Captain Beefheart

Plata

Mosca

Until 1950 ( I was 8) in Buenos Aires we bought ice from the hielero. Because my mother taught at an American high school she had friends in the US Embassy. One of them offered her a fridge as she was moving back home. We had the first refrigerator on our block. I remember that the electric motor that ran it was on top. I made Lime Jell-O.

When we moved to Mexico City our fridge was a Kelvinator.

In 1966 when I fell in love with an Argentine girl at a live performance of Astor Piazzolla, we left and across the street there was an appliance store. She pointed at a fridge and said, “Alex that refrigerator would look very nice in our kitchen.” A couple of months later she called me in the middle of a Buenos Aires winter to terminate our relationship.

Once we arrived in Vancouver by the beginning of the 80s our fridge had many photographs attached with magnets. Many of the Polaroids of my photographic subjects for magazines ended up in their fridges.

In my present Kits fridge there are not photographs on it. Why? The idiot who designed it made sure that the metal face was not magnetic.

Of late as I order my stuff and throw what I believe my daughters will not appreciate, I am thinking how we humans are walking fridges.

If the electricity goes for some time the food inside the fridge will spoil. Our soul/spirit/energy is our electricity. 

 The photograph illustrating this blog is of my former female cat Plata. She and many of our cats liked to be on top of our fridges. Behind her is our Filipino wicker breakfast tray. Rosemary had breakfast in bed for 25 years. I now have it not quite alone as my Niño and Niña are my company.

 Our black cat Mosca also love his fridge.