The ultimate collage

"A city," says Geoffrey James, a Welsh Canadian, "is the ultimate collage. In order to see it you have to walk..." and for the last thirty years or so he has been walking around various cities, in Italy, the USA, France and Canada, taking photos of the contrasts and contradictions he observes.

I went to see the exhibition of his mostly black and white photography at the National Gallery this afternoon, entitled Utopia/Dystopia because Mr James, like T S Eliot, knows that

Between the idea
And the reality [...]
Falls the shadow

Having been a journalist once, he's still a documenter, most recently taking pictures on the edge of Toronto which he sees as "fertile farmland" being turned into "sterile exurbia." Uncharacteristically he has dispensed with black and white film for this project; the vulgarity of these housing developments "seems to demand colour." Previously, he'd photographed the Bain Housing Co-op in a more central part of Toronto to show how that utopian bit of town planning (inspired by Ebenezer Howard's Welwyn Garden City and the like in England) had not lived up to the planner's expectations. (Nor has Welwyn Garden City, by the way. Nor has Philadelphia lived up to Penn's vision of a "greene Country Towne, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.")

In 1988, Geoffrey James became interested in the idealistic landscape architecture of F L Olmsted (1822-1903) who designed New York's Central Park and other such famous green spaces in Washington, Buffalo, etc. What fascinated the photographer, who really appreciated the point of the parks and spent the next seven years cataloguing sixty of them, was the inevitability of their modification. No matter how rigorous or robust the original plan (as the exhibition notes put it),

...most of what [Olmsted] has done has been profoundly altered by neglect, fashion, changing social needs, and the passage of time.

In the Boston park for example, intended as a meadow in which sheep should graze, latter day planners have incorporated exotic flower beds, a golf course, sports fields and a zoo.

Mr James' other projects have been to create panoramas of European formal gardens, to take pictures of the area around Lethbridge on the "desert-like" prairies, of asbestos mines (scars on the landscape in eastern Quebec), and of places that caught his eye in Paris. He loves to be in "places where things are rubbing together", the old and the new, the ugly and the beautiful. In Paris he homes in on geometric shapes, taking bridges and other edifices from unusual angles, making the most of lines of perspective, contrasting surfaces and shadows, reflections in puddles and the complexity of trees. There's a series of tree portraits in one of the galleries, interesting to the photographer because of their "infinite variety."

The most striking photographs, I thought, were the ones he took in San Diego and Tijuana of the U.S. border fence and its immediate surroundings. Made of corrugated metal strips left over from the Gulf War, he says:

What drew me to it was its great incongruity. It doesn't look as if it has been made by the world's only superpower, but rather by some Mexican body-shop guys ... so crazy and contradictory that I had to photograph it.

Cautionary tales

When my Spanish group came round we learned vocabulary for warnings and roadsigns and very useful it will be too, if I'm ever in a Spanish-speaking country. The German group on the other hand, whom I joined after a pleasant half hour riding my bike beside the canal today, read a nineteenth century children's book in rhyming couplets: the story of Max und Moritz and their "seven boyish pranks," by Wilhelm Busch. Very famous in German-speaking countries, these "pranks" are actually quite nasty (grausam!) in places, as is the naughty boys' come-uppance in prank the seventh and last, when they get eaten by some geese.

Max and Moritz weren't the only ones of their kind. They call to mind Till Eulenspiegel, Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter, and Hilaire Belloc's Matilda, Henry, Rebecca and Jim.

The other cautionary tale I read this week was the Manitoban author Margaret Laurence's novel, The Stone Angel, describing the death of a wilful old lady in her nineties. That one was not so funny.

Joie domine ces hauteurs

We revisited St-Donat by air today with Elva, Laurie, Carol and Don, landing on the narrow runway whose threshold is on the shore of Lac Ouareau and walking down the road into town where we lunched (crêpe aux épinards for me) at Le Montagnard. A beautiful day for views both at ground level and from the sky; never mind the wobbly air!

After lunch Chris and I bought a garden chair from the furniture store opposite the restaurant, then the six of us went to sit in the sun for a while by Lac Archambault.

Click on the pictures to see them enlarged.

Herbs

The old dairy farm that stood near the corner of Upper Dwyer Road and Old Almonte Road is now a Herb Garden. Gerry, who didn't enjoy working as an "executive recruiter" in Toronto, brought 'George' here six years ago to live with her in the adjoining farmhouse and to run the place as an agritourism enterprise. They got married in the garden, too.

I took three diplomats' wives to the Herb Garden today where we and our friends had an hour's tour guided by a herbalist (Shannon Gale of Mountain Maiden Herbworks), herbal tea and cake served by 'George' as well as a PowerPoint presentation by Gerry in the log cabin, dried flowers—statice, cornflowers, yarrow—hanging in bunches from the rafters, after which I drove my passengers to Almonte for lunch. This is a picture of Stella (from Bucharest) and me by the weir by the mill at the centre of Almonte.

The remainder of this blog post is a recording of all the things I learned about herbs today.

The word herb comes from the Sanskrit bharb, or the Latin word berba (fodder). When you make your début as a herb gardener, you should grow two of each of the plants you fancy, but before chosing you had best decide if you want your herbs to be used for medicinal, cosmetic, artistic or culinary purposes. (I mostly want to eat mine.) Apart from calendula, basil, coriander, dill and fennel, nearly all the other common herbs are perennials, so don't need much work. Plant basil near your tomatoes and it'll protect them from pests. In fact all pungent herbs act as a natural alternative to pesticide and many of them are deer-resistant too, because animals are too overwhelmed by the smell to come close enough to destroy them. You can pot basil with parsley, dill with cilantro, or rosemary with marjoram or you can grow clumps of similar plants together in beds. A combination of grey-green horehound, lavender and artemisia looks wonderfully silvery by moonlight, said Gerry.

There are nine-hundred species of sage whose botanical name salvia comes from the Latin salvare: to salve, or heal. It's a hard type of plant to kill (although the scarlet sage that hummingbirds like doesn't cope too well with Canadian winters). Sweet woodruff, a shade loving plant, is also fairly indestructible but needs a compost of dead leaves to grow well. Most herbs grow best poorly fertilised soil though there are a few, like basil, that won't tolerate drought. These should be watered in the morning. If you bring pots of them indoors, a hydrometer will prevent you from over-watering.

Lemon balm makes a tea for insomniacs. Lovage enhances soups and many other meals. Feverfew (which spreads like crazy) is said to cure you of a fever. Southernwood and rue ward off infections. Using the flowers of herbs in your salads is even better than using the leaves, because more of the essential oils are concentrated in the flower heads. The flowers of garlic, for example, can be preserved in vinegar, which colours the vinegar pink and makes a tasty dressing.

The screening process for volunteers

I had an email from a teacher called Sarah, this morning:

I hear you are interested in being a volunteer at York Street School - that's great!! We definitely need them. You seem to have a lot of experience that would be very suited to our school...
Whether you'd like to come into my classroom of small people (Gr.1/2) - you are MORE than welcome - or help out in the older grades, that's up to you. I'll put you in touch with the principal ... and she'll be able to find out who else might need volunteer support.
In the meantime, you do have to go through OCRI in order to be an eligible volunteer in the school... And if that gets sorted soon enough - or not - feel free to pop in and introduce yourself!

And she points me to this link. So it's OCRI again, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, the people who also give advice to entrepreneurs at City Hall, whom I mentioned last week. The on-line application to be a volunteer in a school requires that I first "solicit a personal reference" from "two adults who are in a position to comment on my character, temperament or work habits" and an up-to-date Police Record check entailing a visit to a police station, a $12 fee and a three week wait.

Many lives in one

Writing a letter of recommendation for someone applying for associate membership of the CFUW this week, I've had to ask for some details of her history, and have been really impressed and humbled by the answer. As she says, she has a "rich and diverse background." Growing up in Brazil, where her German parents spoke German, her other first language was Portuguese (many years later she also spent four years in Portugal), but having met and married someone who worked for the Canadian foreign service, she has also become fluent in English, French and Spanish, not to mention the Asian languages she needed to master while living in Indonesia, Thailand and India. She tells me she always "sought to understand the culture of her host countries", joining Jakarta's Ganesha Society where she became very knowledgeable about ceramics, or joining an opera appreciation group in Berlin. She worked as a bilingual secretary, a mother, an Ambassador's Wife and an administrative assistant at the Foreign Affairs office in Canada. Now that she and her husband have retired from all those other lives, she's tackling her garden and getting to know people like me.

I'm diversified too, having lived in six different countries with no fixed identity and no actual career. I bet, like me, this lady has often perplexed herself with the questions: what's (been) my role in life? where do I belong? who am I?

Things to do

I missed a good blogging opportunity yesterday by not joining four friends who discovered log-truck races taking place at Mont Laurier airport. Instead, Chris and I were wandering around Wakefield with Laurie and Elva, along the road by the rushing stream, across the bridge by the mill and up the hill to the cemetery once owned, like the mill, by the MacLaren family. Wakefield's a relaxing place where you can draw water from the spring and have some lunch in the room above the General Store.

This week's going to feel shorter than usual because today's Victoria Day. I have another article to complete for the Crosswinds magazine. Chris, who gets on with things better than I, has already finished his own article for our next edition and has been spending the rest of the day polishing up his Flight Operations workbook for aspirant commercial pilots; I've helped him proof-read it.

I have to prepare another German lesson for next Thursday and later this afternoon I'll be talking to a German lady who has never attempted to teach her own language before, and wants some tips. Chris meanwhile will be advising two other young ladies how to design educational computer games for a start-up company.

Next Friday our Diplomatic Hospitality group is inviting diplomats to the Herb Garden at Almonte, where I'll be responsible for the photography. The previous evening, there's a vernissage of mixed media artworks by an artist called Andrea Dankaninova at the Embassy of the Slovak Republic. I'll have to leave early, in order to play the piano at Chris' singing lesson.

Thanks to our friends who helped repair our oven, I can do some baking in advance before the arrival of my Spanish speaking friends, when it will be my turn to provide some refreshments. Besides which I'd better re-lay the wobbly bricks on the steps of our porch that a family of chipmunks has undermined.