Mrs. C and I are unabashed Nipponophiles. We've been there three times but the last visit was a dozen years ago. We are making long-range plans to return about this time next year.
This scene from our local Japanese garden reminds me some of of a famous walkway in Kyoto. It is along a little channelized stream, lined with cherry trees in front of traditional wooden buildings. It's an unforgettable experience.
Throw out your arms and breathe deeply. Feel the warmth (if a little too much too early).
I was looking around for poems about spring for this post and found surprisingly little appropriate. The links kept circling back to the words of a dour native St. Louisan who insisted that "April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." No wonder he spent most of his adult life in dank England. We will revel in our days like this.
We have plenty of magnolia trees in our neighborhood, now starting to pass their peak. I think of them as white or pink, sometimes mixed in lush groves. A few of them in our botanical garden are yellow, something I have not seen elsewhere. The centers of the flowers are fascinating. I haven't needed to tell a pistil from a stamen since 10th grade biology class but something interesting is going in here. Maybe one of our more botanically inclined friends can explain the structure.
I make no claim to being a nature or floral photographer. My attention runs more toward the urban and ironic. Still, whatever these are in the botanical garden got my attention and a daily photo blog has a hungry mouth to feed. Somehow they don't look real, in the sense that the colors came from the earth rather than Photoshop. But what I saw is what you get.
What may we see in our gardens as genetic editing technology progresses even further? It's worth reading up some on CRISPR-Cas9 techniques if it's new to you. O brave new world
That has such people in't! Shakespeare, The Tempest Act 5, scene 1.
Spring in the botanical garden. I have no idea what this is. Being a kid from the concrete jungle my knowledge of gardening is vanishingly small. This flower looks inside out or upside down, maybe to make it easier for bees to get to the business end of it.
