MISS JO IS HAPPY TO LAUNCH HER BLOG on the first day of summer, but she’s also a bit wistful that it’s the end of calla lily season.
From November to mid-June, hip-high bunches of calla lilies with dozens of blooms emerge in the back yard of her rented house in San Francisco. It’s like a gardening windfall that surely the landlord overlooked in calculating the rent.
Now, just a few stems remain.
Callas start to pop up all over San Francisco once the fall/winter rainy season starts— a bit of exotica for Miss Jo, who’s used to paying $4 for single calla stems in Washington, D.C., as limp reminders of trips to Mexico.
SF’s callas could spring from a mural by Diego Rivera, who coincidentally spent time in San Francisco and where he was photographed, below, in 1940 signing a marriage license with Frida Kahlo at City Hall where they got hitched for the second time.
Rivera murals in SF can be found at the California Art Institute; the City Club and the Stock Exchange Tower.
A fourth, Pan American Unity, painted in 1940 for a library at City College of San Francisco, now adorns the school’s cramped theater lobby. (A better home has been proposed for an arts building under construction.)
In the mural, detail below, Rivera beautifully captures landscapes and cityscapes of the Bay Area, 
as well as Mexico City, in an allegory tackling the once controversial idea in North America of fighting the rise of fascism in Europe.
Soon after the mural’s completion WWII broke out. Ironically, Rivera’s prescient work had to be crated because wartime austerity forced City College to scrap its library plans. In 1961, four years after Rivera’s death at 70, the mural found a home at the theater.
Flower photos by Miss Jo