The joy of delphiniums

John took this photo of my friend Linda and me in the delphinium patch of my Dunbar garden on Sunday. I have always loved these flowers for their height and colour; recently I discovered that somebody at VanDusen Garden must feel the same way....

. . .Because there, what a show! A gigantic delphinium patch at VanDusen is even more brilliant because of the golden-leaved trees behind it.

I have a thing for giant flowers – those Jack and the Beanstalk wonders that stretch and tower, preferably above my head. No wonder I lit on delphiniums early in my gardening career, and count them as a yearly treasure. Every spring, it’s a miracle when their green shoots start poking out of a dead-looking garden bed, and if they survive the feasting slugs, transform themselves into a forest of blue, white and purple spikes.

If I’m enchanted by my little back-yard puddle of delphiniums, you can imagine how exciting it was to find a whole sea of them. Way at the back of VanDusen Garden, after the waterfall, the maze, the vegetable garden, the giant-sized red Adirondack chair, I was surprised this week to find a gigantic swirl of delphiniums, a glowing mass of  blues, purples, whites and pinks.

They soar and wobble, topple and tumble on both sides of a curved garden path, a luscious backdrop of colour for preening selfies, besotted couples and parents preserving memories of their toddlers among the flowers. While I was there on Sunday, two young men in business clothes posed gravely for each other at exactly the right spot along the path to ensure they were engulfed in blossoms.

 Delphiniums are a pain to take care of; wind and rain are their enemies, and they need constant staking. But somebody at VanDusen obviously thinks, like I do, that they're worth the trouble. Sometimes people need a forest of flowers that they can imagine climbing to reach the sky.

VanDusen's curved pathway, delphiniums to right and left.

These flowers like to droop; the white ones particularly have been bent by wind, rain or lack of staking.

Instead of staking each flower individually, VanDusen grows its delphiniums in a grid, which peeks out a little in this photo. If it's not enough to hold them up, they just have to flop.

An early look at my delphinium patch; you can see the stakes I have started putting in. In the background are roses and a few peony blossoms. 

My delphiniums, with stakes. They're not nearly as thickly planted as those at VanDusen.

These are foxgloves, which grow almost as a weed in my garden. They're another of those tall flowers I favour, even though they, too, like to flop. 

These are hollyhocks, another "Jack and the  Beanstalk" flower I love. I took this photo on a walk a couple of summers ago; most hollyhocks are just getting started blooming now.

And another hollyhock photo from an earlier year. Unruly, tall and flopping over -- my favourite kind of flower.

Turning 74

John's big birthday splash-out was a dish of vegetarian lasagna at Cafe Salade de Fruits at the French Cultural Centre in Vancouver on Thursday. A hip problem has curtailed driving and even walking, so we took a bus that landed us close to the restaurant.

I was 17 when the Beatles sang, hilariously, impossibly, about getting older, losing their hair, and asked, chirpily: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four.”

Well, today my life partner turned 74.

It was, for the first time in our lives, an old-people’s birthday. We’ve both had a terrible year health-wise, and John’s second round of hip inflammation within months has turned him from a bicycling jock into a limping senior. Driving for too long at a time is uncomfortable; walking too far is a problem.

So today, instead of driving out of town for a birthday lunch, as we have for the last few years, we took a bus that would land us within close walking distance of a Granville Street restaurant. On the bus, the alacrity with which young people leapt up to give John their seats was a measure of how he must appear to those for whom the Beatles’ lyrics are still an unthinkable proposition.

Luckily, as even the youthful Beatles acknowledged in their 1967 song, couples age together (“you’ll be older too”), so to me, John is not old. He’s still the intense photographer I met at age 21; still the athlete who booted it around the track before “jogging” became a fad; still the contrarian ready to challenge the obvious; the joker ready to tell a tall tale; the reader who will succumb to any book with Jane Austen in the title.

And, a decade beyond the Beatles’ wildest imaginings, the answer to their question is, yes.

Books are always the answer to the birthday-gift dilemma. We go together to Hager's books and choose what we want. The non-birthday person pays, then hides and wraps them so they are a "surprise" on the big day. Here, John unwraps his stash.

John's selection this year: Kate Atkinson's new mystery, Big Sky, a  Jackson Brodie novel. Jared Diamond's Upheaval, about how nations deal with crises. Niall Ferguson's The Square and the Tower, about networks and power. And Robert Morrison's The Regency Years, with the intriguing sub-title: During which Jane Austen writes, Napoleon fights, Byron makes love, and Britain becomes modern.

Finishing

John has photographed me many times in the nearly two years I have plugged away at a master's project on migration in ancient Rome. But never have I looked as -- satisfied? relaxed? -- as I did on Saturday, June 8, after I sent it off to my professors. 

Anyone who has ever thrown themselves off a cliff (metaphorically), then wondered why they did it and whether they would survive, will understand my feelings on Saturday when I pushed the “send” button on a 162-page thesis for my Graduate Liberal Studies master’s program at SFU.

Relief, amazement that it’s over, plus a certain amount of pride in sheer perseverance were my main reactions as I sent my paper – commonly known as “the albatross”—winging its way through the internet to my professors.

The Graduate Liberal Studies program is for non-academics, often retired or semi-retired, wanting to learn more about the basics of Western civilization. So we are amateurs dabbling in unfamiliar waters, which seems like dangerous territory for a lengthy, in-depth paper on anything. My solution was to learn something really well – in my case a certain aspect of ancient Roman history – and draw conclusions applicable to modern life. Fanciful? Ridiculous? Who knows what the “real” academics will think?

But in a way, it doesn’t matter. I jumped off a cliff when I started this project nearly two years ago, I learned a lot on the way down -- and I survived.

Part of my "finishing up" celebration was a traditional eye-dotting ceremony.  My niece Aya brought back a figurine from Japan and quietly explained that when you start a project, you dot one of the eyes, and when you finish, you dot the other. As I laboured on through my seemingly endless paper, the figurine with the one dotted eye challenged me to continue. It was a thrill on Saturday to black in the other eye.

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My mascots throughout the project. One was the figurine, now with two dotted-in eyes. Another was the flowers-and-butterflies card that Etienne, Aya and Emi gave me for my birthday last September. It was a cheerful addition to my desk, a reminder of summer days to come. The other was a little stuffed cat knitted by my friend Linda, who cheered me on throughout.