Friday, June 27, 2008

Another Huntington visit - 27 June 2008

We made another of our (almost yearly) pilgrimages to Pasadena's Huntington Library gardens yesterday. There were several species of cereus in bloom, and I took plenty of pictures, only to find the SanDisk CompactFlash card on which they should have been stored essentially empty. Not a single picture. This was a brand new card, which I tested prior to use. The other new card, purchased at the same time, functioned properly, as did the older cards (all SanDisk) I pressed into service. So, as a result, no cereus pictures from the Desert Garden this time around. I wish I knew what happened...

So, our tour today starts with the Lily Pond, which was the main center of attention. The pond was quite still, allowing for some nice reflections off its surface...






We don't recall seeing these huge lotus flowers in our previous visits - at least they were not in bloom...






Also at the Lily Pond, an insect alights on a lotus flower bud...




...while in the water, a turtle swam placidly...

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Mojave pictures from April, 2008

Been too busy to get some poppy pictures I took last April in the Mojave Desert, probably around the peak of the wildflower season there. The display there was nowhere near as good as it has been in the past, but still a good show. The first picture shows a picture I took along a dirt road well north of Hwy 134, looking north.




More poppy fields. In the second picture below, dry white bushes can be seen surrounded by poppies:







Those bushes become tunbleweeds when uprooted. This seems to be as far as those weeds actually get...




Poppies grow along a dry creek that wound its way through a desert farm:




Finally, a poppy rears its head above the crowd..




[27 June 2008: I've been using Apple's .Mac service to host this blog's pictures, but its frequent recent outages have prompted me to move them elsewhere.]

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A new bud!

Since being brought outdoors recently, the new cereus plant acquired last summer has acquired a new bud. There's just one, and it has appeared on a leaf that has not fared very well (note the damage in the pictures below), but so far, so good. I have moved the plant to a place with plenty of light but no direct sun, to see if that helps.




Meanwhile, the original cereus continues to grow. The picture below shows how far it has come as of today. In the foreground, the remains from its first life can again be seen.


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