Helianthus annuus - 28 August 2026

Traditionally my daughter Alexandra brings me sunflowers ( Helianthus annuus) from her Lillooet garden. I would usually put the tall flowers in my lane garden. When Rosemary would look at them she would smile.

With Rosemary gone Ale (pronounced Ah-leh) has been a bit spotty about this tradition. This year she brought me a plant in a large pot and I left it in my deck garden so I could be cheered up with its warm yellow colour. The bloom here is, I believe the last one for its season. I was a tad melancholic when I noticed this about to open completely flower. I see in it a sort of hallow/goodbye gesture. I do believe that besides humans, animals (especially cats) and plants have a vestige of consciousness.

In Spanish a sunflower is a girasol. That literally means of a flower that rotates to face the sun. I wonder if it is true.

As summer wanes Ale’s sunflower has bid me goodbye and because I will be 84 on August 31^st I wonder if I will gaze on a sunflower next year.

Tarren - my first photograph in late 70s

They say that the shortest sentence in English is – I am. Close, in my opinion is – It was. Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector wrote a longish essay about the fact that the English word “it” does not exist in Brazilian (or Spanish).

These days as I approach my 84 year at the end of August I think about stuff that I have done that I will not do again.

For many years, beginning for an article in Vancouver Magazine, I began to photograph ecdysiasts (look it up). One of them was Tarren. Through the years I kept taking her photograph and she became a special subject with which I had an unusual relationship.

This past Monday Tarren came back from a wedding in Winnipeg and stayed in my guest room until the next day at noon. We had long chats about her past business and my photographs and I fed her good meals. She had communicated to me that she wanted me to photograph her on Tuesday morning. I had no idea what she wanted. She is over 60 and obviously does not look like she did in all the photographs that I took of her. With those photographs I learned the term gluteus maximus. She had the best one I ever saw.

Having read Susan Sontag’s 1975 but posthumously published book On Women in which in a nutshell she writes – Old men have character and old women are ugly, I knew I had to be careful how I photographed Tarren. I also had to bring into my session with her that my idea of what women are has dramatically changed since I first photographed her in those late 70s. Important to that change were the views of my proto-feminist wife Rosemary.

Thanks to my knowledge of digital technology and the use of my Fuji X-E3 I think I have done justice to Tarren’s photographs.

And I must thank her for the opportunity to perhaps making this session, the last one I believe with her such a special one.

And I cannot leave here without mentioning that through the years I took lovely bodyscapes of  Tarren. 

Helianthus annuus -

The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is a pleasant fixture of my garden. My daughter Alexandra (Ale and pronounced ah-leh) brings them to me every year from her Lillooet garden. I have fond memories of seeing them in the many times I visited her with my Rosemary. Their bright yellow flowers are cheerful.

This year she brought me only one and in a pot. I decided not to plant it in my back lane garden as I wanted to enjoy on my deck. What you see here is perhaps the last bloom and which has lost its petals.

When I saw it I smiled as to me it looks like a sun shining and telling me, “Alex I will be back next year to cheer your day and give you some of my visual warmth.”

In Spanish its name is girasol which literally means that it turns to face the sun. I am a girasol as I turn to look at it every time I go out to my deck.

It reminds me of my Rosemary’s smile.

Ecdysiasts and some male friends at the Admiral Pub - 22 August 2026

Tonight I had the distinct pleasure of going to en ecdysiast (look it up) reunion at the Admiral Pub in Burnaby that was formerly called the North Burnaby Inn. Premier Glen Clark had debacle associated with involving having someone work on his deck.

There is another interesting story of a handsome Vancouver poet Michael Turner selling a local version of the Brooklyn Bridge to the man who ran the pub, Tony Ricci. I wrote about that here.

Malcolm Lowry & Tony Ricci

While I am about to be 84, for some of the dancers there last night I had a hard time recognizing. While younger that I am they were not spring chickens.

Present was the most important Gary Taylor who was singly responsible for generating what became an extremely active (famous around the world) exotic dancer activity in Vancouver. Sometime in the late 70s he opened a pub on Granville Street called The Castle. He served very good hamburgers and beer while the men indulging could watch women taking it all off. The city deemed this pornographic and closed it down. Taylor went to the British Columbia Supreme Court and won. The rest is history.

The event was well organized by dancer Belinda Jocelyn. She ever arranged for an area that had boards with pictures of dancers in their prime and some posters from the joints that gave them the well paying work.

In my view these dancers were superb and although I never did drink beer, I thought that soda water and, women taking their clothes off, was a perfect combination.

Best of all some situations are far better this century that in the last one. I went home and had Rosemary been around she would not have complained about me smelling of cigarette smoke.

Athyrium filix-femina - 27 August 2026

My Rosemary considered the Lady Fern (Athyrium filix-femina) to be an ordinary weed and she would remove any of them in our Kerrisdale garden. In my Kitsilano deck garden it crops up here and there and especially outside on the path to the back lane. Today I noticed that some of them had this brown colour. I see in this and announcement that autumn is here and that like my hostas they will disappear to come back next year.

I keep repeating this same negative mantra that everything I am doing these days is for the last time. I am not sure I will be around next year to the promise of an emerging garden. There are a few roses in bloom now. Are they last grasps for life?

I miss the warmth of being next to my Rosemary. Fall is about impending death. The Indigenous peoples in BC have the belief that if you survive winter you will live for another year.

Will that be my case? Will I see nice green Lady Ferns fronds in the spring?

Portia Winters at The 5 dressing room

Susan Sontag wrote a book in 1972 that was titled On Women. She died soon after so her book was published posthumously. When I read it last year I realized that a woman’s situation now is not much different than it was in 1972. Sontag, in a nutshell wrote (not her opinion) – Old men have character, old women are ugly.

It is obvious in social media that sexist idiots will post two photographs, one of a young girl (do you know who she is? Years later, she won two Oscars.) and then of that same woman now 80. Rarely have I seen such a thing with male actors like Gregory Peck.

My favourite actress of all time was Rear Window’s  (1954) Grace Kelly (I fell I love with her particularly when I saw her almost final film The Swan. She married that man from Monaco shortly after. But luckily she died while still young so I will never have to look at her old face in social media and gasp.

In the late 70s and 80s I photographed 40 ecdysiasts (look up the word). In most they wore next to nothing or nothing. In 1980 I was 38 years old and I was mildly (?) obsessed with conveying eroticism. At the time I admired Helmut Newton. In my pursuit I often asked these ecdysiasts and others that posed for me what as women they considered erotic. On woman finally did give me an answer, “Yielding flesh.”

Now looking back at all those photographs with my new consideration of what a woman is (inspired for many years by my Rosemary) there is this one illustrating this blog that stands out. Her name was Portia Winters. I was allowed to take photographs inside the Number 5 Orange (The 5 for those who were hip) because I was shooting for an article in the Vancouver business magazine Equity. A writer convinced the then editor Harvey Southam that the article would be about the business side of the industry and it was ultimately called Sex Sells.

I took pictures in that dressing room and Winters never acknowledged my presence. For a while there was a youngish man present who did the hair of the dancers that were there. That was his business.

In 1962 and 1963 I was studing at a college in Mexico City called Mexico City College. I took philosophy for two years because the instructor was a fantastic philosopher from Barcelona called Ramón Xirau. Because of him I became a follower of Plato’s philosophy (that makes me a Platonist). His world was a perfect world of ideas (essences) and a poor copy that was the world of humans. He illustrated this in his allegory of the cave. In a long tunnel, at the end some men were chained to a stone bench and all they saw were reflections on the wall in front of them. Behind them there was a fire that degenerated the reflection that came from the end of the tunnel that was the world outside.

For me this photograph of Winters, she is sure of herself. She knows what and who she is. In short, she is the essence of a woman.

Portia Winters

Rosa 'Double Delight' 19 August 2026

 

Some roses when they bloom make me smile. Rosa ‘Double Delight ‘ is one of them.

Rosa 'Double Delight', (aka ANDeli), is a red blend hybrid tea rose cultivar bred in the United States by Swim & Ellis and introduced in 1977. Its parents were two hybrid tea cultivars, the red and yellow 'Granada' (Lindquist, 1963) and the ivory 'Garden Party' (Swim, 1959)

We originally had this rose in our Kerrisdale garden in the last century. When we moved to our Kitsilano home nine years ago it did not survive the transfer. Last year I found it in a nursery and instantly bought it.

I am sad that Rosemary never got to see it. Like me she would have smiled and instantly put her nose to these two blooms. The rose is most fragrant.

Because I am going to be 84 soon I am finding little interest in buying new roses to replace some that have died. Some of Rosemary’s perennials are still around. I take care of my garden but I am slowly letting it go. I am sure that it will survive and one of the four women in my family might just resurrect it.