Montpelier, VT Jamie Cope, photographer, painter, flower gardener, artist in all that she touched, died in her home on April 18th at the age of 96, while the seeds she had planted for spring sent up green shoots from the pots at the foot of her bed. Jamie grew up in the glamorous 20s and 30s of Hollywood, California, cartwheeling on the beach and rubbing elbows with the archetypal stars of that fabulous era. An extraordinary beauty, she could easily have joined them, but instead (as she always would) struck out on her own path. It led her to New York, where she modeled for Saks Fifth Avenue, and then to Chicago, where she began attending university, falling in love with opera, and haunting the museums. Steeped in culture and ideas, she recognized herself as an artist and never turned back. It was while living in Tuscany in the 50s - with her husband, a literature scholar, and her two children - that she found an abandoned Brownie on an Etruscan wall, waited until dusk for it to be retrieved, then bore it home like the Grail. That Brownie eventually turned into a Hasselblad. Renowned for the intimacy of her portraits and her painterly use of shadow and light, Jamie worked in black and white and developed her own images in a painstaking process almost lost to us now. She earned awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Cambridge Council on the Arts, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and many others. Her solo exhibits have graced the Boston Library; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Johns Hopkins University and the University of Massachusetts, as well as the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and the Galerie Xippas in Paris. In Central Vermont, she has shown at The Helen Day Art Center, The Fleming Museum, and many other venues. Her photos are in the Time Capsule at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. In contrast to the black and white subtlety of her photographs, Jamies paintings - large rich studies of apples, eggplants, red onion, purple cabbage, pears and poppies, translucent, rising mangoes - are celebrations of color, the sap and juice of life. The precision and delicacy of detail are extraordinary, as she painted with her fingertips and the palms of her hands. Jamie loved the life of the Earth, its mystery and beauty. When she bought her home on North Street in Montpelier thirty years ago, it was surrounded by gravel. Now it is circled by white pine and hemlock, birches and apple trees, blue spruce, maple and oak. Each spring and summer she planted flowers in a kind of trance of joy. Fields of iris, trellis of kiwi and honeysuckle, a garden in the boot-shape of Italy . . . a 30-foot deck of flower boxes from which trailed morning glories and sprang nasturtiums, begonia, lantana, geraniums, lavender, flowers like smoke, like flame, like burgeoning stars. And in this town she had a universe of friends. There is hardly a life in Montpelier she has not touched or inspired. I am honored to quote a young man she loved dearly, Emmett Fitzgerald: "I grow evermore astounded by your dogged spirit, your sparkling wit, and the brimming love at the center of everything you do. You have all the wisdom of your years, but somehow you never let go of a special sort of joy usually reserved for children. You will forever be the impossible standard upon which I judge the fullness of my own life." Predeceased six years ago by her beloved son, Cameron Cope, Jamie is survived solely by her daughter, Tami Calliope, whose enormity of loss is exceeded only by her gratitude and love. A celebration of Jamies life will take place in late June. Everyone who holds her memory dear is invited.