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Singing Malaika in the Serengeti

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I have been very fortunate to travel to Africa three times. In October 2014 (my second trip), we visited South Africa as part of a garden tour hosted by Donna Dawson. Apart from visiting Table Mountain and Kirstenbosch National Botanic Garden and wonderful gardens like Harold Porter National Botanical Gardens, Babylonstoren and Makaranga, we took part in a safari at the Southern Camp of Kapama Private Game Reserve. I wrote about that lovely adventure in three blogs starting here.

Kapama was adjacent to Kruger National Park and even though our time there was short (2 days), we saw an abundance of wild animals, including a black-maned lion who roused himself from sleep while we sat in our vehicle and watched.

In 2016 (my third trip), we attended a wedding at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Laikipia, north Kenya, followed by a few days on safari at a tented camp called Kicheche in Ol Pejeta Conservancy, below.

Our Kicheche guide Albert was very skilled, and I wrote a 3-part blog on our wonderful safaris at Kicheche starting here.

The most thrilling experience there – in fact one of my most exciting experiences anywhere – was watching two cheetah brothers mark territory, play and wash each other. Have a look at my YouTube video, below.

Kicheche was rustic (if a bush tent with a bathroom can be called rustic). Lewa Conservancy was different, in that it was also a festive social occasion, shared with friends from Canada and Kenya.  Here I am with Lewa’s wonderful Maasai lodge manager, Karmushu.

But it was also much more luxurious.  Thus, our beautiful Lewa Wilderness accommodation was set on the edge of a hillside leading down into a valley, with a little terrace and chairs outside. That proximity to the wild made our first night there very memorable.

Though we had spent a few days acclimatizing in the Nairobi suburb of Karen (including touring ‘Out of Africa’ writer Karen Blixen’s house) prior to flying into Lewa Downs on their own air strip….

…..we were very ready to sleep, especially given the welcoming four-poster beds in our little house, below. So I was in a dead sleep in the middle of the night when I awoke to a strange sound, like shells sliding slowly along a hard surface, very nearby. It was as if…. as if….. a large animal was dragging its paws as it settled itself onto the still warm polished concrete patio outside our shutters! “Doug!” I whispered. “There’s something outside!”  I had to call a little louder to wake him up. “Doug, listen! I think it could be… I think it’s… a lion!”  Then came the sounds again.  Lions have retractable claws on their paws! How sturdy were those windows? Had we shut the door tight?  “I’m getting into your bed,” I whispered, lifting the mosquito netting, putting my bare feet on the floor and scooting under his netting. We lay there, listening. Then there came a huge heaving sigh, just feet away “Uuuuahhhhahh.”  It had to be a lion!  We stayed awake for a long time listening, but eventually fell asleep again. By morning when we peeked out our shutters, there was no sign of our guest. We were excited to share the news with our friends under the pergola at breakfast, but before we could say anything, someone blurted out, “Hey! Did you guys see the lion this morning?”

Between wedding events, we were able to enjoy a few short game drives at Lewa.

At 62,000 acres (250 km2), it was established as a conservancy in 1995 on the site of a cattle ranch that had been owned by the Craig/Douglas family from 1922. Before becoming a conservancy, the family had established the Ngare Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary to protect endangered black rhinos from poaching for their horns. It is estimated that Kenya’s black rhino population had declined from 20,000 in the mid-1970s to just a few hundred by 1986, when the sanctuary was formed by the Craigs and Mrs. Anna Merz.  We watched a mother black rhino and her calf being walked by rangers….

….. who waited while the rhinos grazed.

We saw some of Lewa’s estimated 400 migratory elephants as they came close to our vehicle…..

….. and dispersed to eat acacia foliage nearby.

We watched a critically-endangered Grévy’s zebra (Equus grevyi) – the largest living wild equid – feeding on grasses.

There were beautiful reticulated giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis reticulata) browsing on thorn trees. The population of reticulated giraffes in east Africa has declined by half in the past 30 years from 36,000 to around 15,000, leading in 2018 to their ‘endangered’ designation by the IUCN. With wildlife conservancies like Lewa offering protection, their numbers are now starting to rebound.

The giraffe neck is one of nature’s miracles.  Giraffes are the tallest land mammals extant. The long neck was originally thought to have evolved in order for giraffes to compete successfully in browsing on high trees, i.e. the “competing browsers” hypothesis. But since giraffes feed during the dry season on low trees with their necks bent, as in the above photo, that theory has been challenged in favour of the “necks-for-sex” hypothesis.  Evidently, the longest, strongest necks on males — used in their ‘necking’ form of fights — help  eliminate romantic competition and therefore attract female mates.

Both hypotheses are given credence today. And whatever the case, the reticulated giraffe is a beautiful animal….

….. with a very sweet face.

I was fascinated by this video of Lewa staff working to remove a metal ring from a giraffe’s leg.

I’ve always been interested in nature’s evolutionary version of a “harem”, as with impalas, Kenya’s most common antelope species. Below we see a herd of female impalas and their dominant male.

There were vervet monkeys at Lewa, too.

The photo below shows a monkey walking the railing at Lewa Wilderness Lodge’s outdoor dining pergola, with the expanse of the beautiful conservancy behind it.

Our game drive wound around a promontory rising out of the savannah.

We saw lots of interesting birds at Lewa as well, including the beautiful superb starling, below.

The blue-naped mousebird had the familiar tuft of our male blue jays and cardinals.

Near Lewa’s abundant farm beds, there were garden areas with flowering aloes where the Hunter’s sunbird was nectaring, below.

This beautiful tapestry defines “garden” at Lewa….

And this.

I had a special tour of the Lewa farm by Will Craig. There were bananas, mangoes, papayas, citrus, pomegranates and all types of vegetables growing in rows.

Fragrant blackthorn trees (Senegalia mellifera) were in flower and alive with honey bees.

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But where’s the music here? Given that this is the 20th blog in #mysongscapes of winter 2020, we can’t just be gallivanting around African savannahs looking at elephants!

Well, that’s where my first trip to Africa comes in, way back in 2007. As a 30th anniversary gift to ourselves, we signed up for a safari to several prominent game parks in Kenya and Tanzania, including Amboseli, Ngorongoro Crater, Maasai Mara, Tarangire and the Serengeti.  It was an opportunity to be close to wild animals, like the elderly lion below taking a few moments of shade beside a safari vehicle in Ngorongoro Crater. It is also my very favourite travel experience.

Now I’m going to set the scene. We’re in the majestic Serengeti. Savannah grasses as far as the eye can see. The name “Serengeti” derives from a word used by the Maasai to describe the area, siringet.  It means “the place where the land runs on forever”

It’s ‘sundowners’ time, i.e. cocktail hour…. and our safari group has been served drinks by our wonderful guides, who hail from tribes in both Kenya and Tanzania, which is where the Serengeti is located. (I was given this small photo of Doug and me on the occasion.)

I needed my glass of wine that day, for I had resolved to sing a little song on the Serengeti. I do love to sing. Not on stage, but at family sing-alongs at the cottage on summer nights; helping to lead the carols and songs at our annual Christmas skating party; at the occasional industry karaoke party; and… loudly… in the shower. The song I had in mind was one I’d heard as a young teen in Vancouver, when my mom took me to see Harry Belafonte and his special guest singer from South Africa, Miriam Makeba. I think it was 1960, Miriam would have been 27 years old. I was transfixed by this young woman who could emanate clicks from somewhere deep in her throat, in the manner of the Xsoha language of her home country. One of the songs she sang was The Click Song.  Over the decades, Miriam Makeba would become known as ‘Mama Africa’. Most of all, I loved a song that Belafonte and Makeba sang together in Swahili – the language of Kenya and Tanzania – called ‘Malaika’, or ‘My Angel’ in English. Written by Adam Salim in 1945, it told of a young man who was sad because he didn’t have enough money for the dowry to marry his sweetheart.  It appeared a few years later on an album I bought, below.

Over the years, I played the album and sang the song over and over, until I knew the words by heart.   So on that occasion in 2007, when I’d had a few glasses of wine to give me courage, I left our group and walked over to where our guides were standing, waiting for us to finish.  “I have a song to sing to you,” I said. They laughed. “Okay!” Then I proceeded to sing all three verses of Malaika. When I finished, they burst into applause. “Mama Africa!” they cried. I was so happy (and relieved) and I sang it again the next night for our friends as we travelled in our safari van under the moonlight from a barbecue dinner on the savannah.   I don’t have a recording of that cocktail recital (thank goodness), but I do have a video I made featuring my own photos of our 2007 safari with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba singing ‘Malaika’ as soundtrack.

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MALAIKA (Adam Salim 1945, sung by Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba)

Malaika
Nakupenda malaika
Malaika
Nakupenda malaika

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Ningekuoa mali we
Ningekuoa dada
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa malaika
Pesa
Zasumbua roho yangu
Pesa
Zasumbua roho yangu
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa malaika
Kidege
Hukuwaza kidege
Kidege
Hukuwaza kidege
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Nashindwa na mali sina, we
Ningekuoa malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina, we
Ningekuoa malaika 
**********

This is the 20th blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading it, have a look at the others.  And please leave a comment if you enjoyed any of them.

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world
  9. Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans
  10. Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens
  11. Miss Rumphius and the Lupines
  12. Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden
  13. Amsterdam… Spring Sunshine – a Dutch travelogue and a brilliant Broadway play
  14. Both Sides Now – a reflection on clouds and Joni Mitchell
  15. Crimson & Clover and Other Legumes – a love letter to the pea family, Fabaceae
  16. Mexico – James Taylor serenades in my travelogue of a decade of trips to Mexico
  17. Crystal Blue Persuasion – blue flowers in the garden
  18. My Bonny – remembering the late Laura Smith (and my dad)
  19. Up on the Roof – a Carole King love-in and a lot of green roofs

Crimson and Clover (and Other Legumes)

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My music tastes tend towards singer-songwriters from the 1960s and 70s with heartfelt lyrics, great musicality and understandable messages. But I do have a bit of a soft spot for a few psychedelic tunes from the late 1960s. I’m thinking of the year 1968 – that’s me in the grainy 1968 shot, below. I wasn’t exactly a flower child in my workaday high heels and Carnaby Street-inspired coat, but I did know how to wield a daisy.

Do you remember this one by Tommy James & the Shondells from 1968?   I loved it. I can still remember the strobe lights pulsing on the dance floor to the words “Cri-m-m-m-m-m-son and cl-o-o-o-o-o-o-ver o-o-o-o-o-over and o-o-o-o-o-over”.  Turn your speakers up!

CRIMSON AND CLOVER (Peter Lucia, Tommy James – Sony/ATV 1968)

Ah, now I don’t hardly know her
But I think I could love her
Crimson and clover

Ah when she comes walking over
Now I’ve been waitin’ to show her
Crimson and clover over and over

Yeah, my, my such a sweet thing
I wanna do everything
What a beautiful feeling
Crimson and clover over and over

Crimson and clover over and over
Crimson and clover over and over
Crimson and clover over and over
Crimson and clover over and over

They weren’t exactly genius lyrics, were they? And such bad grammar: “I don’t hardly know her.”   Turns out the song didn’t have a lot of meaning, it was just some words that came to songwriter Tommy James. As he said in an interview with Songfacts:  “They were just two of my favorite words that came together. Actually, it was one morning as I was getting up out of bed, and it just came to me, those two words. And it sounded so poetic. I had no idea what it meant, or if it meant anything. They were just two of my favorite words”.  But there’s something about the cadence of the song and the very cool tremolo on the chorus that still sends me back to the 60s!

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So, it’s now more than a half-century later.  I’m pretty sure when I was dancing at the Daisy nightclub or The Pink Pussycat or  Oil Can Harry’s in Vancouver in the late 1960s and early 1970s,  I couldn’t have imagined myself writing about psychedelia FIFTY YEARS LATER. But that’s what happens, apparently; one ages. Those lyrics never did mean anything to me, but “clover” means a lot. CLOVER, after all, can make its own nitrogen!

As we learn on Etymology Online, “ ‘clover’ is a plant of the genus Trifolium, widely cultivated as fodder, Middle English claver, from Old English clafre, clæfre  ‘clover’, from Proto-Germanic klaibron (source also of Old Saxon kle, Middle Low German klever, Middle Dutch claver, Dutch klaver, Old High German kleo, German Klee) which is of uncertain origin”.

Hmmm. Uncertain origin. I hate it when you get through all the linguistic roots only to find that no one really knows how “clover” came to be.  Trifolium means “three leaves”, and except for the lucky four-leafed clover, that’s a good key for the clover genus. Perennial Dutch clover (Trifolium repens), which would be “claver” in the Netherlands where it is native (as well as the rest of Europe and Central Asia), has been grown as forage and fodder for centuries. It now grows throughout the world as a lawn weed. Bees love it, like this bumble bee foraging for nectar on the tiny white florets.

It is also a favourite of honey bees, and clover honey is one of the most common honeys. Interestingly, Dutch clover nectar is produced abundantly in the morning but not in the afternoon, so honey bees know when to forage.

Red clover or meadow clover (Trifolium pratense) is also native to Europe but is also found throughout the temperate world as a weed.

Alsike clover (Trifolium hybridum) usually has bi-colour pink-and-white florets. It is found in pasture seed mixes, along with grasses, as a hay crop or forage for animals, especially horses.  Despite its name, it is a true species, though it was originally believed to be a hybrid of T. repens and T. pratense.

During a visit to the wonderful Montreal Botanical Garden one June, I was impressed with a design for a bee-friendly lawn of mixed clovers, instead of a weed-free lawn with no appeal to pollinators.  (However, last March in Chile I did walk barefoot through a clover lawn with painful consequences.  Sadly, the honey bee gave her life.)

The clover that comes closest to Tommy James’s lyrics is crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum), also called Italian clover. Native to most of Europe, it is rarely seen where I live in Canada. I found a single plant in the vegetable garden at Vancouver’s UBC Botanical Garden

There are other plants that we call clovers. White sweet clover (Melilotus albus) is a tall plant with wand-like branching. It is native to Eurasia but widely distributed throughout the world.

Apart from its use as a forage crop, it is also an excellent honey plant.

At my cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, it grows as a drought-tolerant weed in my sandy soil. I thought it looked quite fetching with hoary vervain (Verbena stricta) that I seeded in that area.

Yellow sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis) is another North American “weed” that is native to Eurasia. In Toronto, I found it mixed with red clover.

All the clovers are legumes, members of the pea family Fabaceae (formerly Leguminosae).  The trait that most legumes have in common is their ability to ‘fix’ nitrogen from the soil via various types of rhizobium bacteria that dwell within small growths on their roots called nodules. Nitrogen (N2) is the most abundant gas in earth’s atmosphere and is needed by all living things, but in its gaseous state it cannot be utilized by plants or animals. Animals absorb it in the form of NH4, ammonium or other nitrates in amino acids and proteins directly from  certain plants that they eat,  or from plant-eating animals that they eat. In plants, N2 is fixed via ‘diazotroph’ bacteria like the various types of rhizobia in legumes; many other plant families use different types of free-living soil bacteria, such as frankia (e.g. for alders), to fix nitrogen.  Blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) also fix nitrogen (e.g. for gunnera).

Fabaceae is a huge family, with some 670 temperate and tropical genera ranging from small annuals to massive trees.  Because of their efficient nitrogen fixation, many legumes are grown as crops to produce food for domestic animals or humans.

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) is one of those legumes. In Europe it’s called ‘lucerne’ and it’s been used for grazing, hay and silage for at least two thousand years, since the Greeks and Romans.   It can also be used as a green cover crop to improve the fertility of the soil. When we were visiting my son-in-law’s Alberta farm one summer, he ‘treated’ me to a trip on an ATV to go through their fields.

This was the easy part. There were no knee-high thistles as we approached the hayfield.

I was captivated by all the alfalfa  growing in the fields.

In some places, Alsike clover was mixed in.

The alfalfa bloomed in shades of purple, lilac-blue, mauve…..

….. and white.

I saw bees and dragonflies using the flowers for forage and rest.

A VALENTINE TO FABACEAE

The rest of #mysongscapes blog is just an illustrated love letter to some favourite members of the family Fabaceae.

Bird vetch or tufted vetch (Vicia cracca) is a weedy legume that grows in all the temperate climates of the world. Here it is nitrifying the soil with Dutch clover in a weedy patch in Toronto.

But it is a superb bee plant. In five minutes, I watched honey bees, bumble bees and carpenter bees foraging on it.

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Scientists have long studied nitrogen fixation in one of my favourite little leguminous weeds, birds-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus).  It is currently fixing nitrogen all over the edges of my meadows and garden beds at Lake Muskoka.

I wrote about lupines (Lupinus spp.) in a recent #mysongscapes blog about Miss Rumphius.  Aside from being a way to ‘make the world more beautiful’, as Miss Rumphius counselled,  they also add nitrogen to the soil.

I’ve never managed to grow purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea) in my meadows, but not for want of trying, via seed-sowing.  Have a look at that orange pollen!

I don’t grow annual sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus), much as I would love to. They don’t fit into the way I garden – and my soil isn’t sweet enough for lime-lovers like them – but I do adore burying my nose in their blossoms.

However, even if I wanted to, I could not get rid of everlasting(!) pea (Lathyrus latifolius) that scrambles all over the plants in the meadows at my cottage. Fortunately, the bees like it. Here it is using blue flag iris (I. versicolor) as a trellis.

There’s a beautiful stand of leadplant (Amorpha canescens) in the Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border (my blog) at the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG). The bees are always all over it, too.

An ornamental clover called red feathers  (Trifolium rubens), below …..

…. was used by Piet Oudolf in the TBG’s Entry Border. Though it looked lovely with meadow sage and phlomis and is supposed to be hardy to USDA Zone 3, it did not seem to come back in subsequent years.

Speaking of the TBG, I’ve always loved this Kirilow’s indigo shrub (Indigofera kirilowii) that grows on the Westlake Terrace there. It turns bright yellow in autumn.

And I’m always keen to see the eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) trees come into flower in the TBG’s Nature’s Garden….

….. where they attract all kinds of native bees. This is the unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis).

The TBG’s wisteria (Wisteria floribunda) vine is loaded with pendulous inflorescences each spring.

 Laburnum (Laburnum x watereri ‘Vossii’) produces masses of long, yellow inflorescences, giving it the common name golden chain tree.

I always look forward to the first week in June in Toronto when you can smell the night-time fragrance of the black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacias).  Bees love them too.

And at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery where I have spent hundreds of hours over the past few decades (my blog), it is a fine June indeed when the yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea) graces us with its long white inflorescences (something it only does every 2 or 3 years).

Various beans, peas and other legumes such as peanuts, soybeans, lentils and chickpeas are good sources of vegetable protein and the basis of vegetarian diets. There are lots of different pea varieties (Pisum sativum), of course, but I loved this dwarf type growing on the patio table at Rob Proctor and David Macke’s Denver garden (my blog).

Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more nitrogen you absorb. (Haha, fooled you!) I liked seeing scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) growing on a corn ‘trellis’ with squash underplanted (the “three sisters” in indigenous culture) at Wanuskewin Heritage Park outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (my blog).

Broad bean or fava bean (Vicia faba) is grown around the world, and is also excellent bee forage.

For me, chickpeas (Cicer arietinum) are the ingredient in my homemade hummus (no tahini, magic ingredients are 1 can (2 cups) of chickpeas drained, 1/2 cup of olive oil, 1/4 cup of lemon juice, 2 cloves of garlic crushed,  1/4 cup of parsley, 1 tsp. of salt, dash cayenne).  Whiz until smooth. Refrigerate. You’re welcome.

Then there are the subtropical and tropical legumes like Acacia, Senegalia and Vachellia. In Africa, acacias are a primary food of giraffes, elephants and other animals.

It kind of blows my mind that my 15-second video of ants in a whistling thorn (Vachellia drepanolobium) at Kicheche Camp Laikipia in Kenya (my 3-part safari blog) has been seen by almost 2,400 people since I posted it in 2016. This leguminous shrub and the ants that live inside the swollen thorns have developed a mutualistic relationship: security guard services in exchange for a home.

The African coral tree (Erythrina caffra) has beautiful scarlet-red blossoms.

Desert legumes like honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) are also good bee plants. Its seeds are eaten by many birds and mammals. This is the cultivar ‘Maverick’.

 

Finally, I’d like to raise a glass to the legumes and their good work with this image, made at Kendall-Jackson Wines in Sonoma, California.  It shows that winemaker’s strategy for improving the fertility of soil in the vineyard with an assortment of legumes, including clovers, vetch and fava beans. A toast with crimson wine to the clovers!  Crimson and  clover, over and over and over.

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This is the 15th blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading it, have a look at the others.  And please leave a comment if you enjoyed reading any of them.

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world
  9. Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans
  10. Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens
  11. Miss Rumphius and the Lupines
  12. Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden
  13. Amsterdam… Spring Sunshine
  14. Both Sides Now – a reflection on clouds and Joni Mitchell

Kodachrome – A Life in Photography

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When I first listened to Paul Simon’s ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’, released in spring 1973, I was swept away by the rollicking cadence of ‘Kodachrome’, the first song on the album. It was obviously metaphorical, but I loved the bouncing rhythm and the irreverent opening…. “all that crap I learned in high school”.  And it was Simon without Garfunkel, a big change from the 1960s and their hits, ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Mrs. Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’.

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

1973 was a bit of a heartbreak year for me. A long relationship had ended and I was in a new job, in a new apartment near the beach in Vancouver, with four white parsons tables that my carpenter dad built for me, a mustard-gold Sears sofa, dozens of plants (it was the 70s after all), a brand-new attitude, and a brand-new turntable and Pioneer receiver (far right in the old photos below).  I played Paul Simon so loud on my new stereo that my downstairs neighbours often took exception and knocked on the ceiling, which of course was the essence of (One Man’s Ceiling is) Another Man’s Floor, from that album.

I still love listening to my music loud, and I still adore this album, though now I have the CD, of course. Sometimes, on the 2-1/2 hour drive north to our cottage, I just keep it in the changer and let it play over and over. Kodachrome, Tenderness, Take Me to the Mardi Gras with its New Orleans gospel vibe, American Tune, St. Judy’s Comet, Loves Me Like a Rock, the Reggae rhythms of Was a Sunny Day, etc.

But what about “Kodachrome”…. the film?  Fifteen years later in 1988, I was married with four kids, living in Toronto, and determined somehow to create a career combining writing, which I loved, with gardening, which I also loved. And somehow, I did it! I had my first piece published in my botanical garden’s newsletter that spring.  It was about my backyard pond.  Six years later, I debuted my newspaper column with the Toronto Sun. After my spring introduction, below, I would be required to provide my own photography each week. That went on for six years with this paper, (okay, it was a tabloid with bikini-clad girls on page 3 and hardly any of my friends ever read it, unless they found it on a streetcar or in a hockey arena dressing room, but still….), then another few years with the National Post. So I became a photographer, too.  And when I discovered I loved photographing plants as much as writing about them, I launched my own stock photo library.

In the early 90s, I used a Pentax point-and-shoot camera to illustrate my gardening articles and columns. Then I bought a new Canon Elan SLR. And yes, in those days (1990-1996) I used Kodachrome 64 slide film. It did produce Paul Simon’s “nice, bright colors” but it had problems, too.  It was high contrast, something that can be problematic in garden scenes in bright light. (And since I was never an early morning riser, preferring to work in my office late at night, I counted on overcast conditions for my optimal outdoor light.) Because of its unique emulsion (something about dye couplers), it meant that development of the film had to be done by Kodak or an approved dealer. When digital began to emerge in publishing in the late 1990s and necessitated the scanning of slides, it was apparent that the emulsion did not behave like the Fujichrome transparencies to which I switched after 1996.  (These are so old that the little kid with the beans in the top row is now a dad of a toddler!)

Today I have an overflowing bookcase filled with many dozens of binders of slides containing tens of thousands of pre-2007 images. Having switched to digital that year, I rarely pull out a binder. (The photo below only shows some of them; the rest are scattered around my office.)

But when I do, I cringe if it’s a Kodachrome slide I need to scan with my Plustek scanner (the successor to my first Coolscan scanner, below it), because it requires a lot of fiddling with the software.  I kept the old Coolscan as a stand so the Plustek insertion frame would not knock into my Canon flatbed scanner below.

Over the years, I went through a lot of cameras and lenses and photo tutorials. In 1998, at a workshop in New Brunswick, when the renowned photographer Freeman Patterson turned my camera from horizontal to vertical to show me the difference it made in framing a scene, I could only watch him in amazement. I wanted to see with his eyes.

My cameras came with me everywhere. This was me in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the 1990s. (My hair was still mostly dark then….)

I’ve been photographing at that wonderful 200-acre arboretum/graveyard in all seasons for more than two decades.  Just one of my many ongoing projects.

Another multi-year photography project is the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve in Muskoka. One year, a cousin took me up in his plane with the window open (!)….

……so I could get some aerial shots of the Barrens with fall colour.

I recently had a night sky photography lesson there, with well-known photographer Wes Liikane. I blogged about that evening.

By 2014, I was juggling two cameras, one for wide landscapes, like this one at the Toronto Botanical’s Piet Oudolf-designed entry border (I wrote a comprehensive, 2-part blog about Piet’s design of this border) ….

….the other fitted with a 70-200 f 4.0 lens for intimate design vignettes and close-ups of my beloved pollinator insects.

Photographing on safari in South Africa was much more satisfying with my telephoto lens…..

…..which let me zoom in on the eyes of a black-maned lion just waking up.  (I wrote a 3-part blog about that safari at Kapama Game Park here.)

By the time I visited the Wellcome Collection in London en route to Kenya in spring 2016, I had purchased a lightweight, mirrorless 50x-zoom digital camera (Canon SX50 HS).  And rather than draw a self-portrait like the other people had done there….

….. I used my new camera to do a mirrored selfie. (Well, I needed one for Instagram!)

My new zoom telephoto camera had pretty good video and let me focus at a safe distance on the cheetah brothers roaming the savannah at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya a few weeks later.

I’ve had some magazine covers over the years, and many self-illustrated stories inside the pages.

I loved this cover because it illustrated my story inside the magazine on my wild meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka.

Indeed, our cottage is where I indulge in my love of nature photography….

…. using my own meadows and wildish garden beds……

…… and hummingbird-friendly containers as my muses.

I’ve done some smoke and mirrors fine art photography over the years. Especially in spring, after six long months of winter.

And I’m crazy about autumn, so I’ve used my light table to create some fall colour fine art…..

….. then had a photography show at the perfect time of year.

But seriously, my old slide light tables are mostly used as superhero or cute-kitten tracing centres now….

….. and most of my non-floral photography these days is devoted to my three grandkids. I’ve made a gallery each year filled with photos and videos and I keep them in a private folder on my Smug Mug site.  A gift to my daughter and son-in-law.

But Smug Mug is also where I keep my bees and butterflies and birds and all the plants I’ve managed to keyword and upload to date, which is about 10% of the total. Sigh……

All those years, all those days spent in gardens with cameras… sometimes three of them… slung over my neck, often for 6 or 7 hours straight. Thank you, Naomi Brooks, for recording the moment on that hot August day in 2016 on New York’s High Line when some helpful tourist suggested I get some harness contraption that would keep all the camera straps straight. That really sounded too logical to me!

Though I’ve spent more hours alone photographing in gardens than I could begin to imagine, from time to time, I had a dear photographer friend, Virginia Weiler (aka Ginny) who would bring her camera from her home in North Carolina and we would play like kids together in various photogenic places that piqued our fancy, like a Civil War graveyard in Charleston. Or we would play hooky from boring symposiums and rent a car and drive to the garden we both wanted to photograph. Or we’d phone each other on a few days notice and say, “Superbloom, California!” and fly out to meet and wander the Mojave Desert or Mount Figueroa in the Santa Ynez mountains to photograph poppies and lupines. That’s us below in April 2004, and below that, Ginny and me at the beautiful 2014 Quebec wedding of Ginny and her partner Claudine.

Cellphone cameras? Selfies? I secretly scoffed at tourists like these ones posing beneath the Statue of Liberty and resisted buying a cellphone of any kind until late 2017 when my family said I should have one for night-time driving emergencies.

Then my Samsung S8 became my easy travel camera for social media updating. And yes…. okay… selfies, too.  I joined the legions of ridiculous people, just like I said I wouldn’t.

But for my stock photo library of plants, I still need the higher resolution of my digital SLRs – and I spend much too much time at my desk late at night photo editing. It is truly a life immersed in photography and I am so happy to be there. Buried so deeply I may never be found.

And when I look at my rainbow array of flora, made especially to illustrate my paintbox garden concept, I do know Paul Simon had it exactly right way back in 1973.  We need “those nice bright colors”….

….. because “everything looks worse in black and white”.

KODACHROME (1973-There Goes Rhymin’ Simon – recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Alabama. Here’s a little background on the recording.)

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought ’em all together for one night
I know they’d never match
My sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph

So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

********

 

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Here is the entire #mysongscapes list up until the end of winter (and Covid)!

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;

Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;

Vietnam and Songs of Protest;

Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;

Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;

The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.

Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day

Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world

Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans

Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens

Miss Rumphius and the Lupines

Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden

Amsterdam… Spring Sunshine – a Dutch travelogue and a brilliant Broadway play

Both Sides Now – a reflection on clouds and Joni Mitchell

Crimson & Clover and Other Legumes – a love letter to the pea family, Fabaceae

Mexico – James Taylor serenades in my travelogue of a decade of trips to Mexico

Crystal Blue Persuasion – blue flowers in the garden

My Bonny – remembering the late Laura Smith (and my dad)

Up on the Roof – a Carole King love-in and a lot of green roofs

Singing Malaika in the Serengeti

That Morning Sun – Melody Gardot (who?) and a song of optimism for these times!