Rosemary 1969 with Bougainvillea glabra - 27 July 2026

Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory

This lovely bougaunvillea started to bloom yesterday on my bedroom table by the window. It was Rosemary’s favourite. Somehow it has survived in the warmth of my bedroom. It is impossible for me to look at it every day when I am in or on my bed without thinking of a Rosemary that was. And yet her plant persists to remind me of my loss after a 52 year marriage.

Rosemary in Buenos Aires 23 March 2027

At my age of almost 84 I sometimes think that my forgetting names or getting into my car and not knowing where I am going, are signs of impending dementia. But my persistent memory plays some strange tricks. I can see the photograph of an actor or actress from that other century and the name comes instantly into my grasp. Possibly because of my dyslexia I had to look up the spelling of bougainvillea

Many of these memories are what Julian Barnes in his 2026 January book Departure(s) [does not explain why he has that s in brackets] Involuntary Autobiographical Memory or IAM. I wrote about the book here: Julian Barnes - Death and the Lemon Table

I love that variation of the word to remember in Spanish that Jorge Luís Borges often used in his poems and essays - rememorar. It sort of means, in a lovely poetic sound - to remember again.

Bronwen - June 2&3 2013 - Pentax MX - 20mm f-4 M lens

Malibu Noir Revisited

My life with cars began - in Veracruz, Mexico in 1967. My mother told me I had to learn to drive a car. I received my first driver’s licence then so I was allowed to drive my mother’s Volkswagen Beatle. By the time I married my Rosemary on June 8 1968 my mother facilitated me with money to buy my own Beatle. We drove in that Beatle to Vancouver in 1975. During a snowstorm on Rupert Street I totalled it but we survived without injury. We then had a VW Rabbit, and a Honda Civic. My Rosemary said we had to then buy a good car (not like my two terrible Fiat X-19s which I drove like the macho I thought I was.) so we had a very large Audi with a 5-cylinder engine. Then we leased a smaller one and I bought a used Maserati Biturbo (the worst car of my life. When we could no longer afford leasing a smaller Audi (the expenses for repairing that Maserati were onerous) I told rosemary we had to buy a used car. She became preoccupied when I chose a used 6-cylinder Chevrolet Malibu, a car so good we drove with our two daughters to the south Texas ranch of my St. Edward’s High School fellow student called Michael East.

At that school a classmate who was a day student, and thus could have a car,                                    took pity on me. I did not know how to dance so I had no girlfriends. He arranged with his girlfriend and he came over with another girl and that was how I found out about sexual preliminaries in the back seat of Chevrolet Corvair. Perhaps it was that experience that led me to photograph (last count 5) women women in my cars.

When we had the Malibu we lived in a splendid corner house in Kerrisdale. It had a very large garden. Rosemary taught me to garden and to learn Greek and Latin botanical nomenclature. I was teaching a photography school called Focal Point. My class was called “The Contemporary Portrait Nude. In one of my sessions I had a fine male model called Michael. One day he recommended the school hire Bronwen. For many years I can attest that she posed for me and she inspired me to take some of the best photographs of my life.

Now with my newish 28inch-wide Acer monitor I have been looking at all those files from my past. I tell everybody I know that a photographer is as good as his/her last photographs. I still take photographs with film and digital and some of the photographs that I took of a lovely woman last week are very good.

But Bronwen was special and she inspired me to try all kinds of avant-garde techniques. In the last few days I have been looking at her file and I have made some of the photographs a bit darker or I removed specks of dust. It was then I that I knew I had an idea for this blog.

With a sneer in my face I tell my Vancouver friends that there is a type of photography in Vancouver that is much in vogue as an art form. There are photographers who with this technique are represented by very good galleries. The premise of this art form is that if you photograph a fire hydrant it means nothing. But if you photograph 100 of them then you have your show. The same applies to taking pictures of crowds. I cannot understand this. After seing 10 of these I would become bored.

In Bronwen’s file I have many photographs of her inside my Chevrolet Malibu inside our Kerrisdale garage. I used two cameras, an Asahi Pentax MX, and a Nikon FM-2. With the Pentax I shot Kodak Tri-X. The Nikon was loaded with Fuji 800ISO colour negative film. I also shot some Polaroids with my medium format Mamiya RB-67. From my records I see we had two sessions.

What is most important for me to point out here is that I discovered the when I was sitting in the driver’s seat and Bronwen was on the passenger seat my 20mm Pentax wide angle M-Lens was so rectilinearly  corrected that the first picture you see here you would never suspect that it was taken with an extreme wide angle.

Since as an art photographer ( believe I am one) I am ignored in this city (my grandmother often quoted to me St. Luke – No one is a profit in his own land) this blog will satisfy me as I believe that Bronwen is above photograph of crowds and fire hydrants.

 Should I now photograph 100 lovely Vancouver manhole covers?

No.

I must add that the Malibu was a car my Rosemary loved. When it finally blew a gasket, she, our eldest daughter and I went to Dueck’s on Marine. My Rosemary told me not to sit with them. They dealt with a woman salesperson who asked if they wanted this or that. They said “yes’ to everything. Our and now my 2017 Chevrolet Cruze (assembled in Mexico) is the best car I have ever owned. It even has a heated steering wheel which matches that other fabulous innovation of my Kitsilano home, a heated toilet seat.

Hosta 'Halcyon' 24 July 2026

halcyon(adj.)

"calm, quiet, peaceful," 1540s, in halcyon dayes (translating Latin alcyonei dies, Greek alkyonides hemerai), 14 days of calm weather at the winter solstice, when a mythical bird (also identified with the kingfisher) was said to breed in a nest floating on calm seas. The name of this fabulous bird is attested in Middle English as alcioun (late 14c.).

The name is from Latin halcyon, alcyon, from Greek halkyon, variant (perhaps a misspelling) of alkyon "kingfisher," a word of unknown origin.

The explanation that this is from hals "sea; salt" (see halo-) + kyon "conceiving," present participle of kyein "to conceive," literally "to swell" (see cumulus) probably is ancient folk-etymology to explain a loan-word from a non-Indo-European language. Identified in mythology with Halcyone, daughter of Aeolus, who when widowed threw herself into the sea and became a kingfisher.

The myth of the Halcyon days is unexplained. The above statements have no zoological significance ; the Kingfisher neither breeds at four months old, nor lays five eggs (but rather six or seven), nor nests in the winter season, nor on the sea. I conjecture that the story originally referred to some astronomical phenomenon, probably in connexion with the Pleiades, of which constellation Alcyone is the principal star. [D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, "A Glossary of Greek Birds," 1895] Etymology on Line.

When people ask me what my favourite rose is I usually answer, “It depends on the week.” When the question is about my hostas it is always Hosta ‘Halcyon’. It is an elegant plant with bluish leaves and in July it has beautiful flowers. My blog about the origin of this hosta is this one:

Halcyon the Essence of Blueness

Hostas do not love shade. The proper nomenclature for them is “shade tolerant’. Mine gets mostly shade and it remains blue past August.

Because the expression “halcyon days” is a well-known one for me it is about my days with my Rosemary in our very large corner garden in Kerrisdale. They were definitely the good old days as our granddaughters visited us and I photographed them in our garden.

In my garden there is another comparable plant to my Halcyon and my other hostas. This is my now 5 year old (Rosemary never got to see it) Rosa ‘Emily Carr’. Besides being a lovely red rose it shares with my hostas to do well in all the Canadian provinces down to a Zone 3.

I am a gardener thanks to Rosemary’s prodding. But I can assert that anybody, no matter the colour of their thumb, can grow hostas.

 The above scan is of a Halcyon cultivar for which I have lost the name tag

I fell for my Rosemary on 15 December 1967 when I saw her on the street walking away from me. I say long, straight, blond hair, a dark blue mini dress and legs that were as lovely as my mothers. I was not to know then that soon after I began taking portraits of her and that is how I came to be a portrait photographer.

When we arrived to Vancouver from Mexico City in 1975 I thought that I could immediately work as a portrait photographer. That was not to be and I ended up washing cars at Tilden on Alberni Street for two years. I went to London Drugs to the photography counter and told a man there that I was a portraitist. His answer was brutal, “Sir, I graduated from McGill with a BFA and I don’t call myself a portraitist.

It was working for Vancouver Magazine in the late 70s that my skill in taking portraits was finally appreciated.

In my files now I have thousands of portraits (photographs, negatives, slides and digital files of the people of Vancouver and people who came to Vancouver.

Sometime in the late 70s I was called by a woman who said, “I am an instructor at the YWCA and I want you to photograph me before gravity takes its toll.” And that is how I began to photograph hundreds of women is various stages of undress. Most had lovely faces so I always began with portraits before they removed their clothing.

My experience is this kind of photography is vast and I did notice quickly that the imagination of women on being photographed was superior to mine. They taught me to see.

It was my Rosemary who told me the importance of hands so I incorporated them in my portraits.

Another method I used was to load more than one camera with various kinds of film. They were Kodak B+W Infrared Film, several versions of early Special Order 410 that ultimately became Kodak Technical Pan which was extremely sharp and fine-grained but with its extra sensitivity made skin glow.

Some of these photographs have appeared in my blogs. Many of my subjects have told me to remove their names from them.  

I can report that in my extensive files I have many women listed as politicians, ballet or modern dancers, and actresses.  Female writes are under a file called Writers. But I have a separate  four drawer metal cabinet (around 800 files) of women who posed for me beyond just portraits.

I am now about to be 84 and the time will come when I will have met my oblivion. It will be only then that many of these women will publicly bragg, “I was photographed by Alex Waterouse-Hayward.” It will be only then that I will be rich and famous.

In this blog I have placed photographs of Quilla (and invented name) who had a face.    

Hosta 'Dancing with Dragons' 23 July 2026

 

Perception of an object costs (1071)

Emily Dickinson

Perception of an object costs

Precise the Object's loss —

Perception in itself a Gain

Replying to its Price —

The Object Absolute — is nought —

Perception sets it fair

And then upbraids a Perfectness

That situates so far —

When I began scanning my plants in a lazy hot summer of 2001 I had as my goal to get accurate images of the plants of my garden. I have always scanned at 100% size anybody looking the scans will know the size of the plant. My monitor is calibrated so the colours, especially of my roses are accurate.

Now 25 years later I have become artsy. I believe that my over 3000 plant scans are art which makes me an artist even if nobody will agree with me on both of those opinions.

Artsy involves somehow not being exact on what is perfection. My fellow rosarians of the Vancouver Rose Society do not see the beauty of a rose that is past it. My fellow members of the American Hosta Society, who eschew my perceived beauty of hosta flowers, would not accept the scan here of Hosta ‘Dancing with Dragons’.

St.Augustine: Confessions (Book XI, Chapter 20). “I no longer doubt that time is not more than distension; but what it is, I do not know, and perhaps it might be easy to say that there are three times: the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future. These three things exist in some way in the soul, and I do not see them existing elsewhere: the present of things past is memory; the present of things present is direct perception; the present of things future is expectation."

As a young boy my grandmother often quoted San Agustín. When I went to St. Edward’s the Roman Catholic high school in Austin, I had a fine religion teacher called Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. He became my mentor and friend and even met my Rosemary and granddaughters before he died.

Brother Edwin, my grandmother & Thomistic Theology

It was only a few years after Brother Edwin’s class that I realized that he had not been teaching us religion but a lofty theology. He told us, with many examples, how St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (he insisted on adding the Bishop of Hippo after his name) were full-fledged philosophers.

Last year the proof of that pudding was a program I listened to in CBC Radio’s Ideas. It was dedicated to St. Augustine. I was floored when I learned that St.Agustine had written that: “We listen to a note in a song in the past, then one in the present and we can then predict the one in the future.” Of course this was before the invention of atonal music.

The program had me thinking of the Herodutus idea that you see something in a present that becomes an immediate past as the object floating on river passes under a bridge. Thanks to St. Augustine I figured out that I could run past the bridge and wait for the object to come to a new present.

As I have written often here, across my bed, on the opposite wall there is a framed photograph of Rosemary. She stares at me with sad eyes. I remember that Borges says that every first moment is followed by that same first moment in perpetuity. I look at the portrait and I am about to press the shutter. I imagine what I was telling her as I was about to click my Asahi Pentax S-3 shutter. She was nude. I took the photograph sometime in 1969 and I did a series (quite conservative) from the waist up.

When I turn off the lights at night, Rosemary is still staring at me with those sad eyes.

Hosta 'Joseph' 19 July 2026

Hosta 'Joseph' was introduced by hybridizer Bob Kuk (Kuk's Forest Nursery) and registered in 1990.

With the popularity of variegated hostas, all green ones are not very popular. I actually met Bob Kuk in my first American Hosta Society Convention in Columbus, Ohio in 1991 which is why I bought it. In hosta speak, this hosta has leaves of heavy substance. This means that they are thick and slugs don’t like to chew on them.

Today I noticed that my Joseph, which is in a small pot, had a riot of lovely flowers. Since few I know will be coming to my garden these days I decided to cut them all. I did so and kept their long scapes (hosta stems) so that I could lean them over my scanner.

Members of the AHS eschew hosta flowers. Thanks to Rosemary teaching me to notice details I love hosta flowers. As for the shiny dark green leaves I believe Kermit would adore them.