Plant Faces

Aconitum carmichaellii 'Arendsii' & Helianthus annuus - 12 October 2026

The plants in my garden have human faces. In some cases I have met the hybridizers, people who may have given me them or in many more cases they remind me of my Rosemary who planted them and loved them. My eldest daughter who lives in Lillooet, BC has an almost acre garden. When we moved from our large Kerrisdale corner garden to our present Kitsilano home, Rosemary and I took quite a few of our plants that could survive the Zone 3 (like my hostas) to Ale’s garden.

It has become a yearly custom that Ale brings me her lovely sunflowers in late spring. This year she only brought me one plant in a pot. I left it in my deck so that I could admire its blooms.

The other plant in the scan here was a fave of Rosemary’s. She planted a whole row of them in my largish deck bed. She particularly loved them because Rosemary considered blue to be her favourite colour. Perhaps because Rosemary was restrained in her emotions blue was her colour.

My now gone Wolfram George Schmid, who wrote the bible on hostas, often told me that yellow next to blue made each colour more intense. Thus this scans reminds me of the man who learned Japanese so he could go to Japan to study hostas in the wild.

Two plants, are many people in my memory.