[ 23:01 tuesday 19 april 2016 – old ford lock cottage, london ]

primrose harris, my grandmother, was born on a farm in worcestershire on the nineteenth of april 1916. today would have been her hundredth birthday. her parents named her primrose as a result of queen victoria designating the nineteenth of april as “primrose day”. this was a tribute to victoria’s favourite prime minister benjamin disraeli, who loved primroses, and who died on that day in 1881.

i adored granny. she had magical abilities to make flowers flourish. everywhere she went she’d take clippings of plants that caught her eye and sure enough they’d spring to life in her garden. she had great creativity that was allowed expression in her garden, in flower arranging and in knitting. my childhood and early adulthood was clad in a torrent of wonderful jumpers, many of which i still treasure today.

granny was the only person in the family whose enjoyment of my piano playing remained undimmed as i continued to hammer away hour after hour. she was the only person whose conviction of my saintliness was undaunted on occasions when everyone else had concluded i was behaving like an arrogant brat.

on her ninetieth birthday i placed an order for flowers to be delivered to her each month for the rest of her life. for her ninety-second birthday i recorded six movements of bach’s goldberg variations along with a dedication. i wasn’t there in person as i was speaking at a conference in san francisco. the next day she fell and her leg didn’t heal. she died a few weeks later in hospital in ludlow. the days i spent with her before her death remain the most powerful experiences of my life.

i wanted to find a way to mark today. last night i went through all the 35mm slides i took between 1998 and her death in 2008 (more than 12,000 slides) to pick out some of my photographs of her. here are seventeen of them along with photographs from her garden that i took on the day of her funeral.

bless you granny.

: c :