Couple Posing at Grand Resort Hotel Gardens, Canadian Rockies, 1950s

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Couple Posing at Grand Resort Hotel Gardens, Canadian Rockies, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Couple Posing at Grand Resort Hotel Gardens, Canadian Rockies, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-9BF5B6

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Dressed as though attending a business luncheon rather than a garden stroll, an older couple stand at attention in front of a sweep of red poppies and yellow marigolds at what appears to be one of the great Canadian Pacific Railway resort hotels — the scale of the white terraced building behind them, the immaculate flower borders, and the dark conifer backdrop placing this squarely in the mountain resort tradition that CP Rail built to convince Americans the Rockies were worth the train fare. He wears a suit and flat cap; she wears a matching gray skirt suit and a brooch. They have dressed for the occasion of being on vacation, which in the 1950s was a different occasion from being casual.

The flower borders behind them represent a minor industrial operation in themselves — grand hotel gardens of this era employed full-time groundskeepers whose job was to produce exactly this kind of saturated, symmetrical color, the living proof that a place charging serious room rates took nature seriously. Other guests in lawn chairs are visible on the terraces above, which is where people who had paid to be here were supposed to relax. This couple, however, had found the flower border and were doing the sensible thing: documenting that they had been here, standing very still, not touching the flowers.

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