It was the firsd day of October, and instead of the fine, dry spell which Algy expected in the west Highlands of Scotland at this time of year, the weather was increasingly stormy, with wild winds, torrential rain, and the occasional thunderstorm bringing battering showers of icy water and hailstones.
But in between the squalls there were occasional periods of calm, and Algy took advantage of one such respite to check on his assistants’ hydrangeas, which grew in a relatively sheltered spot. Algy loved the hydrangeas, for one variety produced the clearest powder blue, and the other had fascinating flower heads with deep, dense blue centres that attracted the bees when the weather was kinder, surrounded by lovely mauve bracts (or were they petals?) around the outsides.
It was a wee bit late in the season now, and the hydrangeas were obviously past their best, but Algy was very glad that he had not missed them entirely. Shivering slightly as he perched in the damp bush, Algy studied the flowers and reflected on the changing of the seasons. He was reminded of an odd wee poem by one of his favourite American poets, although his mood was by no means as sombre as that of Mr. Sandburg… and nor were Algy’s hydrangeas white, so they therefore faded rather more gracefully, the colour simply leaching out of them as the season advanced:
Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas turn rust and go soon. Already mid September a line of brown runs over them. One sunset after another tracks the faces, the petals. Waiting, they look over the fence for what way they go.
Algy wishes you all a safe and happy weekend, and hopes that you will be able to find some flowers to brighten your days, wherever you happen to live
[Algy is quoting the poem Hydrangeas by the 20th century American poet Carl Sandburg.]
Carl Sandburg was 83. Marilyn Monroe was 35. That afternoon, as the hours passed (and the alcohol flowed), the bonds of this unique friendship were being formed, that would last until Marilyn’s untimely death on August 5, 1962.
Carl Sandburg, Glendale’s Monte Sano Bridge, March 1921 -by Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather
According to Mather scholar Beth Gates Warren, Mather and Weston entered into a photographic partnership in 1921, and approximately twelve doubly-signed images from this period, among them the present portrait of Sandburg, are extant. This was the only time Weston co-signed work with another photographer.
This photograph of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and biographer, Carl Sandburg, was taken in March 1921 on Glendale’s Monte Sano Bridge. Sandburg, who was married to Edward Steichen’s sister Lillian, was in California on a lecture circuit and to interview Charlie Chaplin for the Chicago Daily News. Weston and Mather made at least two photographs of Sandburg, one of which was included in their joint exhibition at the San Francisco Camera Club in July of that year.
Ref.: Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001) Beth Gates Warren, Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Trust, 2011)
photo and note from Sotheby’s Catalogue : 175 Masterworks To Celebrate 175 Years Of Photography: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation (Sotheby’s, 11-12 Dec. 2014)
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.
