Botanic Gardens part 2

I've been under the weather with a bad head-cold the last few days. I'm glad it's on its way out, as we're meant to be going to visit my brother and his family on Saturday, but it means I've been in bed in the evenings...
Some more sculptures from the Botanic Gardens exhibition, which finishes up tomorrow.

These lilies were in the herbaceous border. I really liked them, C wasn't so sure.

This tent, wigwam, teepee, whatever (called Pine Shadow) was made entirely out of pine needles gathered in the garden and stitched onto ribbon.

Some clever titling here - it was called Answering the Call of Nature, and the building in the background is the old toilet block. I don't know if it's still open since they built the new centre at the entrance. The telephone box was probably about 5 foot high, as it was easy to see the phone sitting on top of it, although from the distance I took the first shot at I couldn't work out what it was.

This one was on the wall around the Alpine House. I really liked it, but I think I might have preferred it set into the ground and reflecting the sky.

Concrete eggs in a large nest - the nest was easily about 3 feet across or more. Fun!! When C said Dinosaur Eggs I thought he was reading the title of the piece, but actually it was just called Nest.

Botanic Gardens part 1

I didn't take a lot of flower photos this time - it was a very overcast day and they weren't looking at their best.
But the morning glories in the Palm House were absolutely beautiful!! They're slightly soft focus as my lens had steamed up so much and I didn't have lens wipes with me.

This was possibly my favourite sculpture. I can't find the plan of where they were all sited in the gardens, so I can't check the title in my catalogue just now.  I could have spent ages looking at them from different angles and seeing how the reflections changed.

I am still around...

The time had come to format my hard drive, re-install Windows and restore everything, so that took a whole day, pretty much, but it was spread over two days. I think it's all back to normal now; still some programmes that I won't remember I used to have until I need them, but all the important things are up and running. Towards the end of my last computer it was so flaky that I was having to re-install several times a week but it's probably been three years since I last had to do it. So after I'd installed Windows and was trying to set up broadband again I was looking and looking for my LAN connection, till I realised that of course I had to install a few drivers to get things going. And then Thunderbird didn't like me having three accounts, and although I did a  specific Thunderbird back up and restored what should have been ALL settings, it only restored one account but all the emails. It took a day before I wondered why I wasn't getting any emails...

We even managed to make it to the Botanic Gardens today. The Sculpture in Context exhibition ends on Friday, and having missed it last year I was determined that we'd make it there this year. The forecast was not good - rain - and our car is still hors de combat / in the dry dock, so it had to be good enough weather to go on the motorbike.
And it was!! You couldn't call it sunny, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was dry which is what mattered.
I'll be back with more photos later on in the week, to be going on with here is the one that I voted for as my favourite. It was titled Do Androids Dream of Mechanical Sheep. Isn't it so much fun?

Top Picks from the Botanics

We were lucky to see the Jade Vine in full bloom again. It seems to be one of those colours that's almost impossible to capture without more post-production than I have time for. This is the third time we've seen it, and probably the most spectacular as some of the tresses were down at eye level. It's some consolation to see, looking at various photos online, that other people too find it hard to capture the colour. Even the first time we saw it, when one of the gardeners gave me some of the fallen flowers to take home, I was never able to get a picture that I felt perfectly captured it.

One of the fly-eating plants - I didn't note the name as it was in a very small and at the time somewhat crowded room at the end of the Orchid House. There was also a series of delightful drawings of the different types of carnivorous plants, with cut-away diagrams showing how they attract and trap insects.

We saw a tortoise down by the lily ponds - the first time in all my years going there that I've seen one, but from the old, flaking shell it's obviously not likely to be a newcomer.

Clematis

Busy day, sunny day, not much time...

Botanic Gardens - Form

This was in the Palm House - it was starting to feel too much like rain in there to take time to look for a plant label, but it reminded me a bit of maranta.

Detail of the Crown Imperial

I could take hundreds of photos of magnolias!!

Botanic Gardens - Colour

When I see forget-me-nots they always remind me of when I worked in a company that imported and distributed fine-art supplies. Myosotis Blue was one of the colours in the gouache range.

There weren't a lot of rhododendrons out in the greenhouse - this was one of them. Just behind it was the jasmine-scented rhododendron - heavenly!!

The current photo challenge on SCS is Show Your Colours, as in flags. Well, I did find a flag during the week, but it was such a still day that it wasn't worth taking a photo of. The stripes in this selection of tulips made me think of a flag, though.

Crown Imperials always remind me of the Little Grey Rabbit books I loved so much - in Little Grey Rabbit's May Day Hare steals some Crown Imperials from a garden in the village for the animals May Day procession.

Sunny Saturday...

In fact it wasn't quite as sunny as the previous couple of days, but still beautiful. I woke early and decided to get up and make some chocolate eclairs for morning coffee and our desserts for the weekend, and then after breakfast we went to the Botanic Gardens. Just as well we left a bit later than normal thanks to the baking - they now don't open till 10 a.m. at the weekend. I tried using a chocolate glaze instead of just melted chocolate - I liked how they came out, but C has requested melted chocolate next time.

Plenty of birds - we saw countless blackbirds, several chaffinches, a moorhen foraging in the grass and even some long-tailed tits, although all I managed to grab was a silhouette photo - they flit around.

I thought I had a saved image of an embroidery of long-tailed tits I did about ten years back  (make that more like twelve or fifteen, on mature reflection!), but I can't find it. I'll have to take a fresh photo tomorrow.


C took the lining out of his coat, and then felt he'd been deceived and deluded  by the sunshine, so we went into the greenhouses for him to warm up a bit. The sprinkler system came on while we were in the Palm House - it almost felt like rain dripping from the leaves. But in fact it can't have been too hot in there, as my lens didn't steam up the way it often does. Two of these photo's are actually C's - the bamboo one, and the one with me in the foreground.

Paradise Abstract

The last of my photos from the Botanic Gardens. The photo challenge on SCS this week was to share photos straight from the camera, no editing apart from re-sizing to upload. My big weak points are not bother to frame properly because I can always crop later, and crooked horizons. That's a funny one, because I don't remember it being a problem with my old SLR - maybe it's to do with an increasingly sore shoulder. I'll have to be more diligent with some exercises...
It was so cold even in the sunshine last Saturday that as soon as I entered the greenhouse my lens steamed right up. I have a few pictures from the temperate zone area, but they could all charitably be described as soft focus. Luckily by the time I reached the central atrium the lens had unfogged again, and this was my shot straight from the camera.

Botanic Gardens, Fauna - a surfeit of squirrels

The squirrels were out in force on Saturday - I always enjoy watching them, and this time there was no C to tell me that they're just rodents. I have to admit that certainly in the photo of the one sitting up a tree, he's very rodent-like. I think it's because his tail isn't bushed up at all.
I was visiting a friend today, and her daughter gave me one of her gerbils to hold; she was so warm. I'd forgotten that, it's years and years since we had pets of that ilk. The sharp smell certainly brought back memories of our childhood guinea-pigs.

Whatever he was digging for, he was pretty to dig quite deep and quite persistently. I was sorry that, yet again, I had forgotten to bring any nuts, as I guess he was looking for food. Not that he looks thin or in any way starved after the hard winter!

Botanic Gardens, Flora

With today being damp, cold and windy we are both glad that we have yesterday to remember for the sunshine. I loved all the scents, too; not just the witch hazel but the Wintersweet which was blooming and scenting the little sensory garden. It's such a plain looking flower and such a beautiful scent.

Celandine

Iris

Snowdrops

Witch Hazel (Hamamelis)

Rhododendron bud

Rhododendron bloom