I’ve spent a few lunch breaks wandering around the Huntington Gardens so far. (It’s peculiar, in the rare books room here, they take away your books from noon to one; they ring a little bell at 11:45 and then the room usually empties out, save for the odd determined academic who cannot stop writing—and for the odd graduate student who got up later than usual and really actually needs to write if she doesn’t want to get a roundhouse kick from her dissertation in two weeks’ time. Ahem.) Today I took my camera along. You might or might not recall my fondness for botanical gardens; if it is the latter, behold my handiwork below. If it is the former, please don’t get bored.
If I had to imagine Perfect Weather, this would be it, this afternoon. (Sorry, everyone who isn’t in California right now.) It was perhaps in the 60s, warming sunshine but a slight edge in the breeze, and the biggest, loveliest open blue sky I have seen for a long, long while.
One thing that often occurs to me when I leave New York is how enormous the sky appears almost anywhere else. There’s so much more to be seen, not fenced round by skyscrapers and sundry other eyesores.
Though the eyesores can be entertaining to look at on occasion.
Here are some other things that are entertaining to look at.
(Doesn’t this one look crazily surreal? I was messing around with the buttons without really knowing what the hell I was doing. Occasionally that seems to work.)
(This one I like in particular.)
(That’s the sort of blue you want to wrap in linen and carry in your pocket for luck.)
(I recently had a discussion with someone special, who revealed that bamboo, because of its immensely fast young growth rate, used to be used for torture. The idea was that you string up your prisoner over a patch of newly-planted bamboo shoots and over the next handful of days [it was a crazy four feet in the first twenty-four hours, or something similarly improbable] they grow right up into and through the unlucky fellow. Worse than waterboarding, though?)
(As I was walking by, I heard a tour guide say helpfully, “These are called pincushion cacti. Except the needles are facing outwards, not inwards. So this is one pincushion you don’t want to touch! Don’t touch the pincushions. Really.”)
2 Comments
February 15, 2008 at 11:52 am
Mind-numbingly beautiful photos. But if I read one more homage to the weather of S. CA, I’ll retch (current temp in MN -1). Remember, those blue skies turn grey during the summer!
February 16, 2008 at 11:45 pm
lovely. it’s -21 here and the windchill is killing me, but i felt like i was surrounded by green for a moment – thanks for sharing.