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.

Vancouver Art Gallery - 20 July 2026

 

Gerry Schallie - 20 July 2026

This past Tuesday my Victoria friend Gerry Schallie visited me. We went to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the American photographer Stephen Shore’s show.

I am not much of a street photographer but Shore had a few portraits that I did like. For me my rewards of the day (besides being accompanied by a friend who is a photographer) were the other salons. The VAG had the largest collection of Emily Carr ever and I particularly liked her pencil sketches. There were two other bonuses. One was a roomful of Group of Seven paintings and in a smaller room of street photograph there were three very lovely Fred Herzogs.

After our tour of the gallery we had iced coffee at Trees on Granville between West Georgia and Robson. I could not recognize the spot where the Farmer Building had been where I had had my large studio on the same floor as Rodney Graham and Neil Wedman.

I keep talking to my Rosemary in my thoughts, “Rosemary you would not recognize the city you brought us from Mexico in 1975."

I am going to put a quote here by Saint Augustine (I am going to write a later blog on him):  Memory is the present of the past.

Sadly I feel now like an alien in this city that I shared with my wife, daughters, granddaughters and many cats. I had a job as a photographer and I felt useful.

Thanks to Schallie I found myself compelled to take one photograph with my Gallaxy phone. Schallie was busy taking many.

As I was returning that evening to my Kitsilano home I notice the brilliant sunset. I hate sunset photographs but I knew I could not avoid this one. I drove down Musqueam View Street to Point Grey Road and armed with that Galaxy I took a few shots of the sunset.

Hostas -  18 July 2026

Crambe maritima & Rosa 'Oliver Roellinger' 18 July 2026

The powdery blue coating on hostas is naturally called leaf wax or leaf bloom. In botany, plants with this type of dusty, waxy coating are described as glaucous. Hostas don't actually have blue pigment. The leaves are naturally green, but this waxy layer reflects light in a way that gives the plant its distinct blueish-gray hue. Plant Delights Nursery

In 1966 while in the Argentine Navy I had a lovely girlfriend called Susana. One day I received a phone call from her. She said, “Don’t ever call me again. You have no culture and you will never amount to anything. I have a new boyfriend who plays the violin for the Teatro Colón Symphony.” For weeks on end I kept playing the Miles Davis record Kind of Blue and Ástor Piazzolla. I discovered so I thought that hitting my depression rock bottom was the way out.

In 1987 I returned to Buenos Aires and rang the bell at Susana’s apartment. She opened the door and said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?’

In my now close to 7000 blogs I find that linking my past memories to my plant scans gives me the excuse to use those scans.

Blue was never my favourite colour. It was Rosemary’s. We had all kinds of blue plants. The one here, Crambe maritima was one of her favourites. When my Argentine artist friend Juan Manuel Sánchez handed me a Chilean translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain I learned of that gentians grew in Switzerland. To surprise Rosemary I found Gentiana asclepiadea at a nursery. She was delighted.

It is blooming now. I will scan it soon. The flowers remind me of Sánchez and Rosemary.

The hostas in the scan all kind of look the same and  mixed them up. They are H. 'Neptune', H. 'Dancing with Dragons'', H. 'Wild Imagination', H. 'Halcyon' and H. 'Dorset Blue'

It is impossible for me to think of my native Argentina today when Argentina is playing Spain without considering those two colours, white and blue of our flag.

More that in the Mexico that I lived for so many years or in the US when I went to school in Austin, I never felt that obsession that we Argentines have for our flag. The flag was designed by Manuel Belgrano who was a patriot during the war of independence who was a dreamer and not a very good general. He picked the the blue so often seen in our open sky pampas.

In school it was hammered on us that the blue was celeste and not azul. Coloured pencil sets in Argentina always had the light blue.

While the concept is now fading, at one time the flag with that sun in the middle was the pabellón or battle flag. It was raised in military establishments and ships of the Argentine Navy. I have my father’s very large wool flag and it has not sun. He would unfurl it twice on our palm tree on  9 July and 25 May the two anniversaries of Argentine independence.

Because of my Argentine obsession for our flag I was always excited when I would see my friend Patrick Reid walking on 41^st in Kerrisdale. I would go up to talk to him knowing he was singly responsible for not only hiring George Stanley who designed the Maple Leaf but also on impulse Reid added an extra point to the leaf when the flag was on his kitchen floor.

My mother always refused to watch football games between Argentina and Mexico saying that if she did the Argentines would surely lose. I sort of think like that. Win or lose I will suffer. Argentines always say they suffer and that may be one of the reasons why Argentina had the highest per-capita psychologists and psychiatrists working there.

After all, tango lyrics almost always are about that woman who left the man.

The rumpled banner here was the banner of the Dirección General del Material Naval which were I was placed as a conscript in the Argentine Navy between 1965 and 1967.

18 July 2026

Scientific Names: The modern classification of clouds uses Latin words based on their visual appearance. These were formalized by pharmacist and meteorologist Luke Howard in 1802

Cirrus: Mount Washington Observatory notes this Latin term translates to "a lock of hair".Cumulus: Latin for "a heap or pile".Stratus: Latin for "a layer or sheet".Nimbus: Indicates a cloud that produces rain.

The phrase "on cloud nine" describes a state of intense euphoria or bliss. Its etymology is uncertain, but it likely stems from 1950s U.S. Weather Bureau classifications, where "Cloud 9" (the cumulonimbus) was the highest, fluffiest, and most impressive cloud. Early 20th-century literature and jazz musicians helped popularize the idiom.

I was taught the above as a boy in an American grammar school in Buenos Aires. How many today would know the terms or find them useful?

I use exterior hard drives to store my large files of my plants scans and my family photographs. I use duplicate hard drives. I don’t trust that cloud in the sky the people use now to store what they consider to be important.

In my daily bike ride to Jericho Beach I invariably stop at a park (always the same one) on Point Grey Road at the end of Musqueam View Street. I take the same view with my Fuji X-E3 and I underexpose it two stops. I find that by then using my 22 year old Photoshop 8 the results better mimic the use of a polarizer.

When I gaze on this view I thank my Rosemary who brought us from Mexico City to Vancouver in 1975. Clouds in Mexico City were always yellow because of the extreme pollution. Rosemary would almost not recognize that 1975 Vancouver because of all the tall buildings on the skyline.