Vancouver is a city with a poor memory for its past. I constantly hear people say, “Do you remember when…?”  The usual answer is, “No.”

My opinion of the Vancouver Archives is not a good one. I see many photographs inserted in publications with no photo credit. It would seem that not only documents and photographs die at the Archives, but photographers, too.

In that last century when former Georgia Straight editor Charles Campbell moved to the editorial department of the Vancouver Sun he created Rear Window just for me (so he told me). It appeared on the weekend magazine. I have placed here the one on former Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau.

I can state unequivocally that this old man remembers lots of stuff. Why? I remember because I have written about it and or photographed the people.

I have extensive files (really huge) of all the folks I have photographed since I arrived in Vancouver in 1975.

Not too long ago I asked a former head of the Vancouver Writers Festival if she/he knew who the first Canadian Poet Laureate was. The answer was negative. George Bowering is going to be 90 in December and I can attest that his marbles are intact as we talk on the phone once a week.

 Does anybody know that Belfast-born George McWhirter was the first Vancouver Poet Laureate.  He taught many soon-to-be journalists and writers at UBC.

Who was and is Brad Cran?

That other Belfast-born Patrick Reid was one of the two people involved in the designing of our Maple Leaf Flag. When I would see him walking on 41st Avenue in Kerrisdale I would always greet him. For me it was a thrill to chat with a living flag designer. And because we were friends I knew he had been the tallest tank commander in the WWII African theatre. He would bump his head with hatches when he climed out of the tanks. Once his unit moved to Sicily, on off days, he played polo on the German horses.

I could go on at length.

Vancouver a city with no memory of its past.

Jorge Alejandro Waterhouse-Hayward de Irureta Goyena - 30 August 2025

 

Two Without & One More

I remember one year that it was my birthday and Rosemary was visiting her mother in Brockville. I was very depressed and I was alone. I called my friend Ian Bateson who did not answer so I sang myself a happy birthday on his answering machine. I was in bed. I decided on something I rarely have done. I was going to get drunk. This was to be the third time to date. I went to the kitchen and placed some strawberries in my blender and lots of rum and ice.

I went back to bed and soon I was feeling no pain. Suddenly I heard the door open and, “Alex I could not leave you alone on your birthday so I am back from Ottawa." I don’t have to elaborate how disgusted my Rosemary was and how guilty I felt.

On another day on my birthday, a few months before Rosemary died on December 9 2020, I was feeling sad because Rosemary was visiting Alexandra in Lillooet. The doorbell rang. Outside was handsome Leslie Dala who told me to take him to the piano room. There, just for me he played all of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

This birthday, tomorrow will not be quite so bad in that both my daughters and Ale’s Mexican friend Eliana Zamora, on a holiday, all came for a visit and cheered me up.

Tonight I will be in the comfortable company of Niño and Niña,

Dahlia hibrida 'Hypnotica White' - Top Rosa 'Fair Bianca' and bottom Rosa 'Whinchester Cathedral' 20 August 2025

When I sit at my oficina accompanied on a chair next to me by either Niño or Niña I feel relaxed. I almost forget my sadness for the loss of my Rosemary. Then it all comes back as most of my scans involve either Rosemary‘s plants, like the dahlia today, or the roses remind me of her dainty and graceful ways. This is especially so when the roses are white. One of the roses, the English Rose Rosa ‘Fair Bianca’ has the scent that the English call myrrh. There was and is a rose called Rosa ‘Yorkshire Splendens’ that is the only rose with this scent that is a combination of magnolia grandiflora, pepper, medicinal and liquorice scents. Rose breeder David Austin (now dead) bred his first English Rose, Rosa ‘Constance Spry’.The other white rose in the scan is Winchester Cathedral which is also an English Rose. Unlike the old roses they resemble they are remontant. This means that they bloom from spring to fall.

The 'Constance Spry' rose is the first commercially introduced cultivar by British rose breeder David Austin, a large pink shrub rose released in 1961. Austin cross-bred the old-fashioned Gallica rose 'Belle Isis' with the modern Floribunda 'Dainty Maid' to create a rose with the desirable form and scent of old roses, though it doesn't repeat bloom. This cultivar marked the beginning of Austin's "English Roses,"

Rosa ‘Belle Isis’ a 19^th century rose had Yorkshire Splendens in its past.

While English Roses and especially the white ones might look dainty they are tough. It is for this reason that these white roses are my Rosemary.

And today, like most days I was visited by small white butterflies that Rosemary adored. I decided that one way or another I was going to take a picture. This I did. While all these butterflies are not the same ones from one year to another I think that Rosemary’s spirit is in all of them.

 

The white butterfly - 29 August 2025

 Jackie Coleman - The Smell of Wet Earth

My Rosemary often told me that I lived too much in my past.  A new Argentine friend of mine, Daniel Pauni, who is a retired literature professor in Buenos Aires, has told me that the Indigenous of Bolivia and Peru place the past in front and the future in back. The word for in front is ñawpaq and the qhipa is behind.

In a recent CBC Radio Ideas about the philosophy of St. Augustine I learned that the philosopher/saint stated that in music, you hear a note in the past, then one in the present and you can predict that future note. This means you can accurately predict the future. Obviously the Bishop of Hippo did not know the existence of atonal music.

All the above means that I know who is Captain Beefheart and I have had too much to think.

Captain Beefheart - Too Much to Think 

A few days ago I found an envelope that read CBC – Jackie Coleman – Leon Bib – nice colour negs.

I took these photographs in Studio 40 at the Vancouver CBC in 1977. I did stills for their variety shows. This one involved fabulous sets by a man called Victor Miles. We became friends and I would often visit him in Lions Bay.

The two dancers in my negatives are Jeff Hyslop and Jackie Coleman. Even though I was a rank amateur I knew I was watching excellence on that stage which was lit a deep red.

To make ends meet, Coleman was an ecdysiast at the Number 5 Orange on Main and Cordova. Because of her dancing talent, and the fact that the DJ there was James Hibbard, who was the head of the CBC dancers she sometimes dances with ballet shoes. She was perhaps one of the best exotics I ever saw.

 James Hibbard

The last time I saw her she was working on construction sites with a sign to tell us to slow down. She died April 2, 2024.

I am a thinking man telling myself that soon I will be 83 and statistically I will not be around much longer. I am throwing stuff, ordering my photographs into portfolio files. Technically I am PTD (preparing to die). And paradoxically I am bringing back to life a woman I photographed so long ago. Only a photographer can understand the idea of a moment in time, perhaps 1/60 of a second, and that my subject was alive in these very negatives that I have scanned.

For these three I have used my now exciting technique (to me) of scanning two negatives, one on top of the other with my Epson flatbed scanner.

I wonder what St. Augustine would have said of the above.

Hosta 'Rainbow's End' 29 August 2025

 

The rainbow never tells me – Emily Dickinson

The rainbow never tells me

That gust and storm are by,

Yet is she more convincing

Than Philosophy.

My flowers turn from Forums—

Yet eloquent declare

What Cato couldn't prove me

Except the birds were here!

Every year my many hostas insist I acknowledge them as to which one is the best. Hosta ‘Rainbow’s End’ has been awfully insistent. I have scanned it and its flowers many times.

In Spanish the word for rainbow is arcoíris which I rather like. I like it especially as I had an aunt in Argentina called Iris Hayward. We pronounced her name “eer-ees” as if it were in Spanish. She made especially good devilled eggs. Her husband was my father’s younger brother. He was called Freddy. We both smoked pipes.

It is the power of plants that make me associate this with that. And of course Emily Dickinson can be relied to have written something to do with the names of my plants. I now have more than 100 blogs where I link my photographs or scans with her poems. The links are below.

The Nuts are Getting Brown

The Persistence of Memory - Emily Dickinson 

She talked as girls do 

I stepped from plank to plank 

When everything that  ticked has stopped 

 Doubly Grateful

A Slash of Blue

For I - inhabit Her

In Ceaseless Rosemary

The Morns are meeker

A Favourite Just Noticed 

All the Witchcraft that we need 

It only gives our wish for blue 

My heart is laden 

Of bronze and blaze

The red and the white 

A Lady Red

Hands 

I took my power in my hands 

That clarifies the sight 

 Nature rarer uses yellow

Rosemary white and a bit of yellow 

Nature rarer uses yellow

Luck is not chance 

T is iris sir 

The white heat

I tried to be a rose 

nature rarer uses yellow 

The Tulip

Nor would I be a poet 

November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf