Book Talk - Old Man’s Garden: The History and Lore of Southern Alberta Wildflowers

An attractive new edition of Annora Brown’s Old Man’s Garden is now available. Join Canmore-based author, Mary-Beth Laviolette in an illustrated presentation about one of Alberta’s most acclaimed wildflower artists. Brown’s literary as well as artistic side will be explored to highlight how as a young woman she came to write and illustrate a Canadian classic during the Depression.

Annora Brown (1899–1987) was one of Alberta’s foremost early artists. She was formally trained at the Ontario College of Art in the 1920s, where the Group of Seven and Robert H. Holmes, one of Ontario’s foremost wildflower artists, instructed her. Her artistic practice spanned the 1930s to the mid-1980s. Despite the isolation of living in the frontier town of Fort Macleod for most of her life, Brown made a living as an artist through teaching (including at Mount Royal College, the University of Alberta, and the Banff School of Fine Arts), illustrating books and magazines, and selling her brightly coloured paintings in watercolour, tempera, and oil, and later, serigraph prints.

Her work is represented in private collections and various public venues such as the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, and Calgary’s Glenbow Museum.