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Miss Rumphius and the Lupines

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I have a particular fondness for the award-winning book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney (Viking, 1982).  First, it celebrates grandparents. Second, it’s a story about enchanting lupines. Third, it honours the essential gardening impulse to “make the world more beautiful”. If you’d like a little 4-minute bedtime story, have a listen to me reading it to my granddaughter Emma.

Who doesn’t love lupines? Or lupins, if you like. I’ve always added the “e” to mine, given that’s how the North American clan are usually spelled. The British tend to refer to them as lupins.  In fact, most of the colourful garden lupines are the offspring of those developed from 1911-1942 by the British horticulturist George Russell (1857-1951). . He planted many lupine species together in his two allotments, including the blue-purple North American species Lupinus polyphyllus – which had been brought back to Britain from the Pacific Northwest  by explorer David Douglas in the 1820s – along with yellow bush lupine (L. arboreus), sulphur lupine (L. sulphureus) and others. As for the crosses, he always claimed he let the bees do the breeding work for him, but he selected the best colour combinations, gave them names and saved the seed to sell. There’s a good story on George Russell and his lupine breeding here.  In Toronto, I get my June fix of multi-colored Russell Hybrids at the spectacular four-square potager garden behind the Spadina House Museum where they grow with lots of old-fashioned flowers.

In June in Toronto, Spadina’s garden is my favourite place to photograph.

The gardeners there keep the lupines coming back every year, with colours ranging from the deepest purple…..

….. to bubblegum-pink, with many bicolors that feature white, yellow and crimson markings.

They’re arrayed around Spadina’s gardens and bloom near the grape vines with sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis)….

…. and the beautiful bearded irises….

…. and blowsy peonies…..

…. and old-fashioned ragged robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi)…..

…. and yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata).

As the lupine season is winding down, the catmints (Nepeta sp.) make pretty partners.

Bumble bees have the long, strong proboscises necessary to probe through the lower keel to get at the pollen. I’ve done a lot of my bumble bee photography at Spadina House.

The Russell Hybrids have given rise to many of the modern lupines, like the Gallery Series in red….

….. and white.

I’ve been photographing lupines for a long time. The photo workshop I took with Freeman Patterson at his New Brunswick Nature Conservancy property Shamper’s Bluff back in the 90s featured….

…. lots of lupines in his beautiful meadows. Someone caught me intent on capturing dewdrops.

At Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, native bigleaf lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. polyphyllus) is planted under silk tassel bush (Garrya elliptica ‘James Roof’).

Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. polyphyllus is the locally indigenous sub-species of bigleaf lupine.

When I was travelling in Sisimiut, Greenland, I came upon this lovely stand of Nootka lupine, Lupinus nootkatensis.

One floriferous California spring (2004), I found this stunning hillside of dwarf lupine (Lupinus nanus) in the Los Padres National Forest.

Ten years later, I photographed arroyo lupine (Lupinus succulentus) in a magnificent meadow at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, along with yellow tidytips (Layia platyglossa) and goldfields (Lasthenia californica).

I came across an amazing meadow containing lupines and hawkweed in Vermont one June, and used it as the dreamy background to some abstract images…..

….. featuring close-ups of lupines. They hang in my kitchen at home.

But back to my own little patch of ground: my meadow at Lake Muskoka. I have to say it wasn’t easy to establish lupines, but after figuring out what they needed to germinate, and where they wanted to grow their first set of leaves, and how to care for them that first season, I enjoyed their beautiful spires each June.

They loved my acidic soil – they do much better in a low pH soil, despite what some cultivation guides say – and…….

…… the overwintering bumble bee queens always found the pollen to furnish their nests.

They emerged with an early cast of characters including blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) and ubiquitous oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), below.

You can see some of wild lupine’s meadow companions in this bouquet I made featuring oxeye daisy, blue false indigo, large-flowered penstemon (P. grandiflorus), blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) and buttercups.

Many years, my lupines sported impressive coats of aphids. If I had the energy I’d try to spray the stems with soapy water, but there were lots of stems…..

And in time, I had my own supply of lupine seeds. But the white and red pines I planted in the meadows have now grown so tall that they shade out the wildflowers and grasses. That was the general idea: to have “in-between meadows” as our hillside healed itself after our construction there. I do miss them in their abundance, but enjoy the few that flower still.

There’s another reason I love Miss Rumphius. It was the subject of the very last weekly gardening column I wrote in 2006 for a certain national newspaper before they cancelled my column “to focus more on real estate”.  In truth, they were bleeding money and I was just one more freelance budget item to cut. (At least I hope that was the case!)

Miss Rumphius (Viking, 1982) – written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.

In any event, the column I wrote detailed how I managed to germinate and grow seed of Lupinus perennis at my cottage, seen in the photos above, and I offer it here in case you want to make the world more beautiful.

ADVENTURES OF A LUPINE LADY (May 2006)

There’s a much-loved children’s book called Miss Rumphius (Puffin,1985).  Written and illustrated by the late Barbara Cooney and first published by Viking in 1982, it won the American Book Award for its renowned Maine author.

Miss Rumphius tells the story of a little girl named Alice who sits on her grandfather’s knee and tells him she wants to be just like him: to travel to far-away places and live in a house by the sea.  Her grandfather says that isn’t enough:  “You must do something to make the world more beautiful”.

Alice grows up to become Miss Rumphius, the librarian.  She travels far and wide, climbs mountains, rides camels and buys a little house by the sea.  But she’s worried because she hasn’t yet made the world a more beautiful place.  Then one spring she spots “a large patch of blue and purple and rose-colored lupines” in flower on a hillside near her home where they’ve spread from plants in her own garden.  Miss Rumphius becomes the Lupine Lady, spreading lupine seeds wherever she goes and, yes, making the world more beautiful.

Like Miss Rumphius, I adore lupines with their bewitching blue and purple flower spires in late spring.  At my cottage,  I’m working on creating my own wild lupine meadow too.  But at the rate my plants are growing, I’ll be an old woman with a cane by the time I’m ready to beautify the rest of the world.  For lupines have very particular needs, both in their germination and ongoing growth.

Growing Wild Lupines

Perennial wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) or sundial lupine is native to eastern Canada and the eastern U.S. where large lupine meadows are a familiar sight in late spring-early summer in the Maritimes and New England.  One of more than 300 lupine species worldwide, it’s the only known host food plant for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.  Preferring full sun and well-drained, sandy soil with a low pH (acidic), wild lupine grows naturally in sand prairies, open oak woodlands and grassy areas with granite-based soils.  It will not tolerate clay soil, making it a challenge to grow in most gardens.

Nursery-grown lupines often fail because their long tap roots make potted plants notoriously difficult to transplant, so it’s preferable to grow your plants from seed.  If I do the math on my own seed-to-plant success, I estimate it’s about a 10:1 ratio, so a large supply of seeds is needed . Note: L. perennis is a widespread species and available from a large number of seed companies, including Wildflower Farm and Prairie Moon Nursery. (Postscript:  But do make sure it’s the right species – my seed turned out to be the west coast species L. polyphyllus or a hybrid of L. perennis and L. polyphyllus.  Lovely but not the same thing.)

This spring, I sowed a handful of lupine seeds at my lakeside cottage, observing a ritual I’ve perfected over the past five years.  First, I soak the large seeds overnight in water to soften them.  Then I get down on my hands and knees and carefully press each seed just under the soil surface in what I call my “lupine mud”.  It’s actually a patch of rich, damp, sandy soil behind the house that never dries out because it’s in part shade at the bottom of a hill, thus retaining the moisture that wild lupine seeds need to germinate.  I’ve tried at various times of the year to germinate lupine seeds in situ, but their critical need for moisture immediately after germination has led me to separate my seed bed from the actual growing locations.

A month or so later, when the little plants have several leaves and a small root system, I’ll carefully scoop them up with a large spoon and transplant them into my dry, sunny hillside meadows where I water them regularly the first summer as they put down their tap roots.  Those that survive the first winter seem indestructible and completely drought-tolerant thereafter.  They may not bloom for two, three or four years, but they’re on their way, ever so slowly, to becoming a meadow.

We can’t all be like Miss Rumphius, travelling to far-off places and living in a house by the sea.  But we can, in our own small way, make the world a more beautiful place.

********

It’s impossible to find a song about lupines, and not easy to find a song about gardens and children either, I discovered, but I did remember this one written by Dave Mallett in 1975. Personally, I would not use the word “prayer” and instead substitute the word “compost” – but I suppose a lot of people would not object to being prayerful about their garden. So here it is with John Denver and some singing flowers from Sesame Street.

THE GARDEN SONG (Dave Mallett composer, 1975)

Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down

Pulling weeds and picking stones
Man is made of dreams and bones
Feel the need to grow my own
Cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain
Find my way in nature’s chain
And tune my body and my brain
To the music from the land 

And inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down 

And plant your rows straight and long
Temper them with prayer and song
Mother Earth will make you strong
If you give her love and care
Old crow watching hungrily
From his perch in yonder tree
In my garden I’m as free
As that feathered thief up there 

And inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down

******

This is the eleventh blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others:

  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

Please feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Raindrops

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Have I told you lately that I love you?  Oh, never mind. That’s a different Van Morrison song. Just thought I’d throw it in here, for all the folks who’ve patiently travelled this  #mysongscapes road with me thus far.  And it’s not a ‘Van the Man’ song today like my last two blogs, but an older guy who’s no longer with us. We’ll get to him later.  In the meantime, can we talk about rain?  As in….

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Let’s talk about rain and photography!  Because depending on how you look at rain, your glass is either half-empty or half-full. And I’m definitely in the latter camp, as you can see by my smiling face as I stride down the High Line under my umbrella. (Thanks to my photographer pal Ginny Weiler for the photo.)

Unless it’s pouring down (and I’ve been in some of those rains carrying three cameras in a big garden far from shelter), an overcast sky and drizzle is far easier to deal with than the bright sunshine of mid-day. Look at the beautiful Magnolia ashei I photographed that May day on the High Line….

….. and the prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) beside the rain-spattered sign….

….. and the pretty heuchera leaf turned over under raindrops to show its lovely purple reverse.

Apart from the gentle light for photography, in a place like the High Line there are far fewer visitors when it’s drizzling.

When I visit Vancouver, I make sure I take an umbrella to photograph plants at my two favourite haunts, the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and Van Dusen Botanical Garden. In fact, the wettest I’ve ever been in was at UBC on May 29, 2013 – and the raindrops in the pond below just got more serious as I moved through the garden.

But when I’ve got the day booked for plant photography, I hate to give up because of a little downpour…..

…. especially when the Himalayan poppies, below, are in perfect bloom in the David Lam Asian Garden.  The raindrops just add to the enchantment – and I have never sprayed a blossom with water to make it more “picturesque”, when nature does it for me for free!  (By the way, I wrote a blog on the exquisite David Lam garden in May.)

The redvein enkianthus (E. campanulatus) looked lovely in the drizzle……

….. and across Marine Drive, the Garry Oak Meadow was gorgeous that rainy day. Imagine how terrible this tapestry would have looked in full sun!

In UBC’s herb garden, bees were still foraging on the Angelica archangelica, despite the weather.

The downward-facing flowers of Sicilian honey lily (Allium siculum) acted like umbrellas for this bumble bee, though her fur-like hairs were beginning to mat down in the rain.

Though it hails from the hot, dry Drakensberg Range in South Africa, the Moraea robusta in UBC’s wonderful rock garden wore its sunshine yellow with raindrops that day.

A few weeks later in early June, I was back at my “home garden”, the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG) on a rainy June morning with no one else around. Though the paving stones were wet on the Westview Terrace where the Indigofera kirolowii was in full flower….

….. and at the entrance to the Floral Hall Courtyard where the Bowman’s root (Porteranthus trifoliatus previously Gillenia) was a cloud of white…..

…..my raindrop close-ups from that day, like the Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’, below, were lovely.

Peonies were just opening that day in June, too…..

…. and the lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) wore its many rain-spattered, folded capes.

Even the eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) sported its raindrops nicely.

Though I’m usually alone at the TBG on a rainy day, I occasionally catch sight of a pretty umbrella held by another intrepid garden visitor.

On June 8, 2015, I visited the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington Ontario with a group of fellow bloggers. We drove there through a massive rainstorm, so when we arrived at the famous Iris Collection….

….. all the bearded irises were delightfully adorned with raindrops. This is ‘Florentine Silk’.

There were so many, I wanted to capture them in one gorgeous photographic memory.

In Manhattan one hot, humid August afternoon, I braved an uptown subway train with no air-conditioning and waited out a thunderstorm and all the people running out of the beautiful Conservatory Garden at Central Park so I could be almost all alone there.

But it didn’t take long for a few people with umbrellas to return to enjoy the spectacular, Lynden Miller-designed borders. I blogged about that August afternoon in the garden.

When I visited Monet’s garden at Giverny in France in April 2008, a spring shower meant the other visitors carried their umbrellas over his famous Japanese bridge on the lily pond…..

…. but all the flowers enjoyed the rain. I blogged about the spring lessons from Giverny as well.

The majority of my rainy photo shoots were in spring, as you might expect “when April showers bring May flowers”.  But May has its share of rainy flowers too. This was on May 5, 2014 at the Horticultural Centre of the Pacific just outside Victoria, B.C.  Bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica) and Tulipa bakeri ‘Lilac Wonder’ looked enchanting to me…..

…. and the trumpets of the little gentians were laden with raindrops.

The skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) was happy to be in its preferred damp state that day.

And of course spring at Vancouver’s wonderful Van Dusen Botanical Garden means there will be lots of west coast rain to make the various Himalayan poppies (Meconopsis)….

….. in the Himalayan Dell just that much lovelier.

While staying with friends in Sun Valley, Idaho in September 2016, we took a walk through a wild meadow just as big rainclouds appeared behind the mountains.

Though we didn’t make it home before getting soaked, I was happy to have had my camera with me to capture the intricacy of the rain drops on the meadow grass seedheads. (And I will refrain from mentioning the irony of rain in Sun Valley….)

More recently, if you read my massive blog about Botanizing Greece with Liberto in November 2019, you might recall the day we stopped at a serpentine outcrop near Smokovo in the pouring rain…..

….. to look for tiny Crocus cancellatus subsp. mazziaricus, which we did find, but they were as soaked as I was.

We also found our first Sternbergia lutea that morning, but they refused to open in the inclement weather (which is an obvious evolutionary adaptation to keep the reproductive parts dry).

A few redbud (Cercis siliquastrum) flowers still hung on to the trees and they did look pretty in the rain….

….. as did the wild flowers in the meadow (even as my shoes were squishing in the grasses).

In the fall of 2015, I visited Costa Rica with my hiking group. Though we did manage some hiking, that particular one-week period had more rain than the Osa Peninsula had seen in the entire rainy season. I blogged about my time at El Remanso Lodge, but here’s a little video of what real rain is like in a tropical rainforest…..

In my own Ontario gardens, as you might expect, my camera is never far away when the rain stops. At the cottage on Lake Muskoka one June, I found my wild lupines spangled with raindrops…..

…. and the palmate leaves with their small hairs seemed to trap perfect raindrops like mercury quicksilver.

When a big rainstorm hits the cottage on a summer day, it’s often so spectacular in its onset that I grab my camera and set it to video. Have a look (and try to pick up the distant thunder in the first few seconds) ……

At home in Toronto, rainy May days are welcomed because summer is often hot and dry and our urban tree canopy needs all the help it can get. Especially lovely are spring bulbs – this is Tulipa ‘Ballade’, one of my favourites…

….. and this is ‘Angelique’ looking like ballerina tutus hung on a line to dry.

A few years ago, I stood under my umbrella photographing my grandson Oliver doing a little jaunt on the stepping-stone path through the spring bulbs in my front yard while rain poured down and thunder boomed in the distance. Doesn’t he look proud of himself?  I snapped a still photo at the end.

But since this is #mysongscapes, we do need a song to finish up this blog, so let’s take a rainy day tour of my entire Toronto garden, as I found it under my umbrella on June 24, 2018.  And we’ll be serenaded by Dee Clark with his famous Raindrops song from 1961.

*******

This is the tenth blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with

  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

And please do feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Brown Eyed Girl(s)

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Let’s stick with Sir Van Morrison in this, the ninth blog of #mysongscapes. The year before he recorded ‘Astral Weeks’ with ‘Madame George’, my favourite song and the subject of my last blog, he had a smash hit with the pop-infused ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ of 1967. As usual with Van, however, the song’s meaning was confusing. He originally wrote it, he has said, with a calypso flavour as ‘Brown Skinned Girl’… “kind of a Jamican song”.. but changed the words to make it more radio-friendly. The lyrics were racy for the time (even though 1967 was the hippie-flavoured summer of love). “Making love in the green grass/behind the stadium with you/My brown-eyed girl” didn’t make it past the censors for a lot of radio stations, who substituted different chorus lyrics when they played it. But it’s still the song that gets entire tables of women of all ages up dancing when it’s played by the deejay at that wedding reception. Because who doesn’t want to be Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl”?

BROWN EYED GIRL

Hey, where did we go?
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow
Playin’ a new game
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin’ and you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Whatever happened
To Tuesday and so slow?
Going down the old mine
With a transistor radio
Standing in the sunlight laughing
Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall
Slipping and sliding
All along the waterfall, with you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da
Just like that
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da

So hard to find my way
Now that I’m all on my own
I saw you just the other day
My, how you have grown
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometimes I’m overcome thinking ’bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da
(Bit by bit, by bit, by bit, by bit, by bit)
(Sha la la la la la la, la te da, la te da
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da, la te da
(La te da, da da da da da da da da)

*********
My Brown-Eyed Girls

Okay… you knew where this was going, didn’t you? Yes, I do love my rudbeckias, whether they’re called black-eyed susans or blackeyed Susans or brown-eyed suzies or coneflowers.. whatever. In fact, at our cottage they were once the only flower I grew. Seriously. In 2002, when we were trying to keep the freshly delivered soil from sliding down the hillside at our newly-built cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, I mixed a few ounces of the tiny seeds of the native Rudbeckia hirta or wild black-eyed susan, into a sack of red fescue (Festuca rubra) seed and raked it in. Because this species is biennial, that first summer the little rosettes of foliage formed. But the following year, they flowered in golden profusion and my hillside looked magical.

Every time I walked down my stairs, it was into a sea of black-eyed susans.

I spent a lot of time crouched down photographing them.

That summer of 2003 was so magical (and I knew it was once-in-a-lifetime) so I did some impressionist stuff like this….

…. and this….

…. and this butterfly. And the following year I had a photography show to celebrate my “black-eyed susan summer”.

I asked my 92-year-old mother-in-law (then still living down the lake shore from us) to hold a little bunch of them in her hands. Ten years later, it became the final image in the slide show at her funeral service.

The black-eyed susans attracted lots of pollinators to the true flowers, the little yellow specks you can hardly see arrayed around the brown eye or cone.

Rudbeckia hirta’s botanical name means “hairy”, and you can see the hairs on the sepals and involucre, below. They also line the stem and leaves.

With so many thousands of black-eyed susans in my meadows, it was fascinating to explore them carefully. Doing so allowed me to see that nature often makes mistakes, like this mutant double flower.

And I was fascinated with the difference in size and vigor between plants grown from seed I had sown in rich, moist soil and those I’d sprinkled in dusty, dry soil near the roots of white pine trees. This phenomenon is not part of the evolutionary journey of the species, but is the result of “phenotypic plasticity”, i.e. the ability of a species to adapt to conditions without any mutational change in its genetic makeup.

As the years passed, the black-eyed susans became just part of the cast of characters in my cottage flora. They looked lovely with butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and pink musk mallow (Malva moschata) …..

….. and  hoary vervain (Verbena stricta)……

….. and peeking around the big, fragrant blossoms of the Orienpet lily Lilium ‘Conca d’Or’.

Rudbeckias are part of the massive Asteraceae family of composite species evolved to offer compound inflorescences composed of colourful, insect-attracting ray petals and masses of tiny “true” flowers. In my meadows I grow several of these yellow composite “daisy” flowers, including Rudbeckia hirta and Rudbeckia subtomentosa as well as Heliopsis, Silphium and Ratibida species. Not shown in the tapestry below are Coreopsis and Anthemis, also in my meadows.

For late summer, I love sweet blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia subtomentosa). This species gets its name from the subtle fragrance of the flowers that appear in clusters atop tall stems. Its newly-emerging central cone is truly brown, unlike the very dark cone of Rudbeckia hirta.  Later it turns black.

In my meadows, it flowers at the same time as New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), below and also Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum).

Throughout summer I gather blackeyed susans for bouquets. One year, I photographed a vase in my meadow filled with what was in bloom there in mid-July. Apart from Rudbeckia hirta, there’s pink Monarda fistulosa, lilac Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’, orange Asclepias tuberosa  and yellow Heliopsis helianthoides and Coreopsis lanceolata.

One rainy August day, I lined up some vintage apothecary bottles filled with what I found in bloom or fruit. Black-eyed susans were just a small part of that lovely abundance.

By September, the meadow has fewer species in flower but in the tiny bouquets below, sweet black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) looked lovely with long-flowering Heliopsis helianthoides, ‘Gold Plate’ yarrow (Achillea filipendulina), goldenrod (Solidago rugosa) and the native asters, including lavender Symphyotrichum azureum, purple New England aster (Symphyotrichum nova-angliae) and white lance-leaved aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum).

Another year, I combined Canada goldenrod with New York ironweed and sweet black-eyed susans for a September bouquet.
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In my front yard pollinator garden in Toronto, I use the ubiquitous, award-winning perennial black-eyed susan Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’.  It likes to seize ground so I occasionally pull it out when it wants to invade its less aggressive neighbours…..

…. but I like the rich gold as an easy, long-flowering filler plant with the pinks, blues and purples of echinacea, perovskia, liatris and sedum.

Here it is with late-blooming rough blazing star (Liatris aspera).

‘Goldsturm’ black-eyed susan is a mainstay in my friend Marnie Wright’s beautiful Bracebridge, Ontario garden, along with summer phlox and hydrangeas. (Have a look at this blog I wrote about Marnie’s garden.)

When I travel, I take note of different black-eyed susans used effectively in designs. This is sweet black-eyed susan (R. subtomentosa) in an exuberant display on New York’s High Line.

At the wonderful Legacy Prairie at Niagara Parks Botanical Garden, Rudbeckia hirta is used throughout. Here we see it mixed with wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa)…..

…. and here with a cloud of white mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) and orange butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).

Here it is with purple dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) at the front, tall vervain (Verbena hastata) in the middle and gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) at right.

Native grasses can be good partners for black-eyed susans. At the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG), I photographed Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ with little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).

But the TBG has lots of gardens and here we see Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum ‘Gateway’) partnering with ‘Goldsturm’.

Another summer, I photographed ‘Goldsturm’ with tall, pale-yellow Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ behind it and smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria ‘Purpurea’) beside it. The spike seedheads are from ligularia.

Another late-summer perennial at the TBG is great blue lobelia (L. siphilitica), which looks beautiful with R. ‘Goldsturm’.

The TBG also uses a quill-petalled cultivar of Rudbeckia subtomentosa called ‘Henry Eilers’, combining it nicely with rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium).

I adored this lighter-than-air combination of R subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’ matched up perfectly with the dark bottlebrush flowers of Japanese burnet (Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Purpurea’).

But the best design I saw using ‘Henry Eilers’ was at Terra Nova Nurseries in Oregon, where it was combined with the snakeroot Actaea simplex ‘Black Negligee’, its dark foliage accenting those dark cones perfectly.

Breeders continue to work with black-eyed susans, especially at Chicago Botanic Gardens where numerous taxa are assessed in the Bernice E. Lavin Plant Evaluation Garden, below.

There are other species of Rudbeckia native to North America that are often seen in gardens. This is brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba), below, a short-lived perennial which is often described as weedy or invasive, but its small flowers can be a good addition to a rich, moist meadow.

Rudbeckia nitida or shiny coneflower is tall with reflexed yellow petals, prominent greenish cones. The cultivar ‘Herbstsonne’ is the one most often available (though some experts believe this cultivar is actually a hybrid between R. nitida and R. laciniata).

Rudbeckia laciniata or cutleaf coneflower is usually seen in its old-fashioned double forms, ‘Hortensia’, below, or ‘Goldquelle’.

Among the showiest black-eyed susans are the gloriosa daisies, which are tetraploid versions of Rudbeckia hirta. That means they have twice the normal chromosomes, a condition created by treating them with colchicine (from autumn crocuses) or radiation. Tetraploidy results in larger flowers than normal, and the condition persists in seedlings so gloriosa daisies come true from seed. Like regular R. hirta, gloriosa daisies are usually biennial, but may flower the same year if seeds are sown indoors in winter.  Gloriosa daisies exhibit myriad colours or streaks of colour. Or they might have doubled petals.

At the Montreal Botanical Garden (MBG) one summer, I photographed a delightful meadow of gloriosa daisies – a wonderful variety of cultivars mixed with blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus) and orange cosmos (C. sulphureus).

 

Along the central strip in MBG’s magnificent perennial garden, they had planted rainbow chard with the dwarf gloriosa daisy ‘Toto’ and a curly carex edging.

At the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario, I liked seeing native bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix) interplanted with gloriosa daisies.

I’ll finish my Van Morrison-inspired musings with a few gloriosa beauties. This is ‘Autumn Colors’ (which is a very variable cultivar)…..

…. and ‘Denver Daisy’….

…. and ‘Cherry Brandy’…..

….. and ‘Irish Eyes’ with its lovely green cone.

Speaking of Irish eyes, mine happen to be green.  The genetics of eye colour is incredibly complex, but depends on alleles in your parents’ genome and the concentration of melanin in the iris.

I am the only one in my family of six to have green eyes – my parents both had blue eyes, and my children all have blue or greyish-blue eyes. If I wanted to be Van Morrison’s brown-eyed girl – laughing and a running hey hey/skipping and a jumping – I’d have to buy tinted contact lenses, something that makeup artists frequently use in film. I didn’t want to go that far, but I do have Photoshop. What do you think?

*********

This is the ninth blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with

  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

And please do feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Madame George

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How to introduce my very favourite song in the entire world in this 8th blog of #mysongscapes – while finding some relationship to my own photography, as I promised in the first blog?  And what can I say about Madame George, the genius 10-minute song from the genius album that is Van Morrison’s iconic 1968 ‘Astral Weeks’ that hasn’t already been said?

I’m not sure how one develops a taste for certain songs or types of music. Some of it is in our genes, I suspect, but much of it is in our exposure to music at periods in our lives where it gets into our bloodstream: snatches of songs our parents sang that we remember from childhood; songs, singers and musical groups heard on the radio – in my case, from the rich singer-songwriter era of the 1960s and 70s; music my kids listened to as they were growing up – reggae, hip-hop, rap, house, jungle and other strange musical genres I cannot name.

It’s clear to me that some people are simply more attuned to music than others; it forms a kind of soundtrack in their heads, whether the trigger is intrinsic or extrinsic. We sing to ourselves, we sing in the shower, we hum, tap our feet and listen to music in our cars. We go to concerts; we sing in choirs; we play in bands. Music moves us. To sit in the dining room of my late mother’s nursing home on entertainment night and watch the old melodies and lyrics light up the faces of people whose memories had long fled, it is clear that music resides in a wholly distinct part of the brain.

As for those folk songs of the 60s and 70s and more modern lyrics that evoke the stories that folk songs do so well, I’ve been a collector for many years and my CD mixes are in my car and in my kitchen (and a few friends’ homes too) where they are played regularly.

Why the philosophical preamble to Madame George? It’s just a song after all. The point I am trying to make is that this song, for some reason, speaks in a very deep way to my psyche, my consciousness, my soul… or whatever inner entity combines hearing and cognition with rapture. The music swirling around Morrison’s voice like a whirlpool is hypnotic, the lyrics mysterious – I never tire of either, but I’ve given up trying to divine what the words mean. They are all the more remarkable when you consider that they were written by a 23-year old Irish lad, living in Boston and fresh off the success of his first big song, 1967’s Brown-Eyed Girl. But in 1968 he was embroiled in a label dispute with Bang Records following owner Bert Berns’ death and looking for new management when a number of producers came to a Boston studio to hear the songs he’d been working on. One of them, Lewis Merenstein, upon hearing Morrison playing ‘Astral Weeks’ said:  “I started crying. It just vibrated in my soul, and I knew that I wanted to work with that sound.”  He took Morrison to New York and surrounded him with top-flight jazz musicians. John Payne is on flute; Richard Davis plays upright bass; Warren Smith Jr. is the percussionist; Jay Berliner plays acoustic guitar along with Morrison; and Connie Kay is on drums. A favourite part for me is the snare drum adding a military cadence to the line “Marching with the soldier boy behind”.  The strings were dubbed later and Morrison hated them, but when I listen to their sweet sound ascend after he sings ‘the cool night air like Shalimar’ it seems to me that it adds necessary lightness, but then I love strings.  The two recording sessions in September and October 1968 are the stuff of legend, but the musicians did their thing separately from Morrison, who recorded in a glass booth. Recalled Richard Davis fifty year later:  “He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth. And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, or we to him…And he seemed very shy…”  Alchemy happened nonetheless.

And who was “Madame George” anyway? Based on the lyrics, some people think he/she is a drug-taking, cross-dressing transvestite with male customers. Morrison himself has said in interviews that Madame George was just “poetry and mythical musings channelled from my imagination” and the title character based on six or seven people. There are probably as many opinions about the song’s meaning as there are adoring fans who have been bewitched by it. The strangest thing about the song is that it’s titled Madame George but Morrison sings it throughout as Madame Joy. Later, he said: “The original title was ‘Madame Joy’ but the way I wrote it down was ‘Madame George’. Don’t ask me why I do this because I just don’t know. The song is just a stream of conscious thing, like Cyprus Avenue. It may have something to do with my great aunt whose name was Joy. Apparently she was clairvoyant…. that may have something to do with it. Aunt Joy lived in the area mentioned in connection with Cyprus Avenue. She lived on a street just off Fitzroy Street which is quite near to Cyprus Avenue.”

‘Astral Weeks’ is on myriad “Best Albums of all Time” lists and has its fans among music’s cognoscenti. Elvis Costello said it is “still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium, and there hasn’t been a record with that amount of daring made since“.  Joan Armatrading credited it with opening her up to music.  Bruce Springsteen said:  “The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again.  But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. There’d be no New York City Serenade if there hadn’t been Astral Weeks.”

Let’s listen. Turn your speakers up loud. Try to follow the lyrics, but shut your eyes when it comes to the incantations at the end, “the love that loves to love that loves to love that loves…..”

MADAME GEORGE, Van Morrison (1968)

Down on Cyprus Avenue
With the childlike visions leaping into view
The clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe
Ford and Fitzroy, Madame Joy

Marching with the soldier boy behind
He’s much older now with hat on drinking wine
And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through
The cool night air like Shalimar

And outside they’re making all the stops
The kids out in the street collecting bottle-tops
Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops
Happy taken Madame Joy

That’s when you fall
Whoa, whoa, whoah.. that’s when you fall
Yeah, that’s when you fall

When you fall into a trance
Sitting on a sofa playing games of chance
With your folded arms and history books you glance
Into the eyes of Madame Joy

Then you think you found the bag
You’re getting weaker and your knees begin to sag
In a corner playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madame Joy

And then from outside the frosty window, raps
She jumps up and says, Lord, have mercy I think that it’s the cops
And immediately drops everything she gots
Down into the street below

And you know you gotta go
On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below
And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow

Say goodbye to Madame Joy
Dry your eye for Madame Joy
Wonder why for Madame Joy, Whoa oh oh oh oh 

And as you leave the room is filled with music
Laughing, music, dancing, music all around the room
And all the little boys come around
Walking away from it all, so cold

And as you’re about to leave
She jumps up and says, hey love, you forgot your gloves
And the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
The love that loves   

Say goodbye to Madame Joy
Dry your eye for Madame Joy
Wonder why for Madame Joy
Dry your eyes for Madame Joy
Say goodbye

In the wind and the rain on the back street
In the backstreet, in the back street
Say goodbye to Madame Joy
In the backstreet, in the back street, in the back street

Down home, down home in the back street
Gotta go, say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
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Say goodbye to Madame Joy
And the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

Say goodbye goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to Madame Joy
Dry your eye for Madame Joy
Wonder why for Madame Joy
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye 

Get on the train
Get on the train, the train, the train, the train, the train,
This is the train, this is the train
This is the train
Whoa, say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train, get on the train

Forty years after ‘Astral Weeks’ was released, Van Morrison launched a tour highlighting the album with two concerts in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl on November 7th and 8th, 2008. The grand finale was Madame George.  If he had once detested the strings that Merenstein dubbed over his song, he seemed to have resigned himself to the magic they added since I count a few cellos and at least one violin on the stage in the performance below.

Watching the video of Van Morrison performing the song in concert four decades later, the clear zenith of the remarkable song cycle that was ‘Astral Weeks’ with his jazz scat phrasing as he “gets on the train, the train, the train” before leaving the stage, I think two things. First, I wish I’d been there. Second, remarkably, on the very night he was performing ‘Astral Weeks’ in LA, I was at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California listening to his daughter Shana Morrison, below centre, with Buffy Ford-Stewart, right, singing in a tribute concert to Buffy’s husband, the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart.  I’ve written about my few years working with John’s music to create a stage treatment for it, but before writing this blog on Madame George, I hadn’t realized that Shana and her father were both singing in California on the same night, each paying tribute to remarkable music from the past.

What’s even more strange, after the show I listened to her singing Sweet Thing from ‘Astral Weeks’ a cappella in a post-performance jam session in a Mill Valley hotel room. She had recorded that song herself and has often sung with her father on tour.

Belfast

All of my ancestry is Northern Irish, as I wrote in my recent blog on Galway Bay; my maternal grandfather was born in the countryside near Belfast.  If there is a central theme in ‘Astral Weeks’ it is the city of Belfast. Cyprus Avenue is a leafy street in the well-to-do section of the city – it was the other side of the tracks from the neighbourhood where Van Morrison grew up, as it would have been for my blacksmith grandfather out in the country 25 miles away near Banbridge.  I had a look on Google Earth and today, as in 1968, it is a broad avenue lined with mature trees and the mansions are hedged for privacy.

But leaving Cyprus Avenue, we can revisit a few of the places that I saw and photographed during my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2008. There’s Belfast City Hall (1906) downtown.

We can take a walk through the ground floor of beautiful Queen’s University (1849).

But if you’re like me, you’ll need some flora with your music so let’s visit the Botanic Gardens with its statue of the Right Honourable William Thomson, Lord Kelvin at the entrance.  He was Belfast-born but teaching at the University of Glasgow when he devised the absolute temperature scale which is named the “Kelvin scale” for him. He also worked on the laws of thermodynamics and on the installation of the first telegraph cables below the Atlantic Ocean.

I was photographing cherry blossoms that spring, which is pretty obvious.

The garden’s star attraction is the stunning Palm House. From Wikipedia, I learned that “the gardens’ most notable feature is the Palm House conservatory. The foundation stone was laid by the Marquess of Donegall in 1839 and work was completed in 1840. It is one of the earliest examples of a curvilinear cast iron glasshouses in the world. Designed by Charles Lanyon and built by Richard Turner, Belfast’s Palm House predates the glasshouses at Kew and the Irish National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin, both of which Turner went on to build. The Palm House consists of two wings, the cool wing and the tropical wing. Lanyon altered his original plans to increase the height of the latter wing’s dome, allowing for much taller plants.”

We visited on May 3rd, and the tulips and wallflowers were at their peak.

Inside the glasshouses, there were fragrant spring bulbs and a profusion…

…. of hothouse plants like cineraria and salpiglossis.

Outside, there were families and little children and people walking dogs.

It was a delightful spring day to be in Belfast, the city where Van Morrison came of age. Where he grew up with his family in a 2-story brick terrace house on Hyndford Street in the city’s east end and first dipped his foot into music with his skiffle band, The Sputniks, at age 13, and his rhythm-and-blues band, Them, six years later.  And from there, as we know, it wasn’t long before he was “on Cyprus Avenue, with those childlike visions leaping into view”.

********

This is the eighth blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with:

  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

And please do feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Gordon Lightfoot on a Snow Day

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I used to think I was lucky to live in a part of the world with four distinct seasons. How could I appreciate the swan song of autumn without the colourful abundance that is summer?  How could I love summer, if not for the delicate opening act of spring that promised such fullness? And how was it possible to revere the first warm days and blossoms of spring, without living through the long months of winter, when hope seems as far underground as the resting shoots and roots?   But as I age, that last seasonal quid pro quo seems less attractive. Five to six months of winter is a long time. And the first snow, often as autumn leaves are still changing colour on the trees in November, is a shock to the system.

WINTER ON LAKE MUSKOKA

I am very fortunate, for I get to enjoy the beauty and rigour of winter in two places: at our cottage on Lake Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto, and at the house in the north end of the city where I’ve lived and gardened for more than 37 years now. Driving north to Muskoka in winter, we often pass cornfield stubble dusted with snow. Hopefully the roads aren’t bad for driving….

….. but sometimes, it’s a little scary.

Snow tires are a must and all-wheel drive is important, too, for the hills on the dirt road we have to negotiate to get to where we park. (Do you like my licence plate? That was the logo I used on my first business card and letterhead back in the late 1980s. It’s a good thing no one tried to speak to me en Français…)

We drag toboggans packed with our food and wine on a path through the forest. Hopefully the snow isn’t too deep because we’re getting a little old for tramping down a foot of powder.

And then we arrive. The deck and my summer pots are covered with fresh snow, the white pines look lovely.

I gaze through my bedroom window and….

….. down the hillside to the frozen lake, and the outdoors beckons.

I glance at my little west meadow as I head out. Another year I didn’t get to chop down the plants in November.

Then I pick my way carefully down the stairs towards the lake.

Sometimes, after freezing rain, the white pines on the dock wear a fringe of icicles…

… and above the frozen lake floats a soft mist.

Deep snow on the lake is beautiful, but it insulates with its warmth and works against the thickening of ice.  Extreme caution is needed and an official measurement of lake ice thickness before heading out on snowshoes or cross-country skis.

I am not an early riser, but once in a while I’ll catch a Lake Muskoka sunrise and it is definitely worth being on time for that after a fresh snow.

The swim ladder should be lifted each year to avoid mangling when the ice starts to thaw and move in spring. But sometimes we forget….

Showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) is a beautiful, late season lifeline for all the bumble bees that call my meadows home. Its fluffy spires always last through the first few snows.

When we’ve been assured that the ice is thick enough, we set off down the lake with our hiking poles and sometimes our snowshoes too.  It’s easy hiking.

Or we follow the path through the forest and walk the dirt road around the end of the lake and sneak a peek at our place from across the bay.  That’s the screened porch where we eat our summer dinners.

If we’re feeling energetic, we might get into the car and drive the 12 kilometres to the Torrance Barrens, where I like to hike in summer.  My four kids looked kind of like Goths invading the Barrens one December a few years ago.

It is so very peaceful in winter, all the sounds muffled…..

…. all the bog grasses sculpted into snowy hummocks.

The back of the cottage often looks like this after hikes….

….. and if we’re lucky there might be a rosy sunset as day turns to night and we retreat indoors with our books.

I made a little video that captures the flavour of winter in our little bay on Lake Muskoka.  (Listen for the train whistle at 32 seconds.) Oh, did I mention the wind-chill can sometimes freeze your skin in minutes?

WINTER IN THE CITY

In Toronto, winter is a time to work on projects that require long periods of time at my computer. And I can often convince myself to bring my camera outdoors – at least for those initial few beautiful snowfalls of winter – perhaps with a first stop at the living room window to view the Japanese maple through my witches’ balls…
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…. then a walk down the front steps to check on the pollinator island under a snowy blanket.

Maybe wave to the snowplow operator.

If I turn the corner down the driveway to the garden gate…..

…. I might peek through just to get that same ‘secret garden’ thrill I felt when I first installed the heating grate in the 1980s…..

….. then I open the gate and head down the side-yard path that was a driveway once, back when cars were narrow and fit this restricted space.

Under the arch of orange-fruited bittersweet, I see my six pots on the lower deck. They’re planted with hardy sedums and grasses that benefit from that snowy blanket, but it won’t last long since this winter, like 2010 and 2012, is forecast to be relatively mild.

The fruit of my Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum) and bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) — yes, the evil Asian one — wear sweet little snow hats.

I wear a winter hat too, and snap a snowy selfie.

The pond garden looks so lovely when snow covers up all the weeds I didn’t get to pull in autumn and the yews I didn’t manage to prune.

And the sundeck looks pristine until my footprints mess up all the perfect snow. But that’s okay… it’s time to go indoors and take off my boots and turn on some music.

Speaking of music, have a little look at this video of my Toronto garden in winter. I actually forgot that when I filmed the snow falling from inside my kitchen, I was playing a favourite song by Greg Brown on my stereo, sung here on a tribute album by Leandra Peak and Neal Hagberg. Somehow, the lyrics reminded me of the power of winter snow to wash clean the detritus of autumn and this song captures that idea so beautifully. “Wash my eyes that I may see/the yellow return to the willow tree“.

********

Song for a Winter’s Night, Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

It wouldn’t be a blog in #mysongscapes of 2020 without a song. This time, I’m featuring Canadian musical icon Gordon Lightfoot and his beautiful ‘Song For a Winter’s Night’. Though it sounds like a love song he might have written late gazing out a window at the falling snow, the story goes that “the song was written on a hot summer night in Cleveland while Lightfoot was performing there. He was missing his wife of the time, Brita Ingegerd Olaisson, and his thoughts turned to winter.” As to his first wife, there’s actually a neighbourhood connection here. Gordon Lightfoot is a singular talent who has been writing and performing for more than 50 years with classic songs such as If You Could Read my Mind, Early Morning Rain, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, etc.  But when his first marriage to his Swedish wife Brita was ending in the early 1970s (he was married three times with numerous relationships in between), they were living in a rambling house on the corner of the Blythwood ravine just two blocks away from our house in Toronto. It’s long gone and redeveloped now, sold as part of what was (at the time) the largest divorce settlement in Canadian history. The final straw in the marriage breakdown was his affair with Cathy Smith, the subject of his song ‘Sundown’, and the femme fatale (literally) who injected John Belushi with his last speedball.

Okay, enough of the supermarket magazine gossip. Here is Gordon singing his lovely winter song live back in 1967. Try to ignore the goofy introduction and the fact that the audience looks to be hypnotized or perhaps temporarily drugged and just concentrate on the song.  And note the jaunty rhythm.

Now, to illustrate how a song’s arrangement can make a profound difference in how we experience it and connect to it emotionally, listen to fellow Canadian Sarah McLachlan sing the song 27 years later for the 1994 film ‘Miracle on 34th Street‘.

Need I tell you which version I prefer?

SONG FOR A WINTER’S NIGHT, Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

The lamp is burnin’ low upon my table top
The snow is softly falling
The air is still in the silence of my room
I hear your voice softly calling

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you

The smoke is rising in the shadows overhead
My glass is almost empty
I read again between the lines upon the page
The words of love you sent me

If I could know within my heart
That you were lonely too
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you

The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim
The shades of night are lifting
The morning light steals across my window pane
Where webs of snow are drifting

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
And to be once again with with you
To be once again with with you

***********

This is the seventh blog in #mysongscapes series that combine music I love with my photography. If you liked it, check out the others beginning with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’; Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography; Vietnam and Songs of Protest; a visit to Ireland and Galway Bay; Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. The last one recalled a John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.

And please feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.