Aha.
For a while, over the years, I’d see them in only one colour at a time, and would conjecture that they are all related since the shapes were all similar (out hiking on trails, the wild varieties - not these). See an earlier post on this here where the conjecture was confirmed by a bit of research with helpful discussion and links from some readers.
Now I found a cluster of them all together in an Aspen garden that I just happened to be walking by. So, columbines in three shades below for you (Click for larger views):
Continue reading ‘Combined Columbines’
It is Mother’s Day in the USA (a few weeks after the UK one - this means I send two sets of greetings to my mother each year). This year, rather than a rose, I’m going to put up a member of the gladiolus family, since one of mine put on a stunning display two days ago and deserves to be shared.
I almost forgot to carry out my plan to do this post, as I’ve been shooting Continue reading ‘Glad it is Mother’s Day’
Lunchtime. Here’s a brief report on my garden activity this morning. It’s all about the succulents. Or the succulence. Take your pick. I’ve been meaning to plant these out for almost a year, I sheepishly admit…
…and also it was time to transplant the large aloe to a more suitable pot.
Continue reading ‘Excellent Succulents’
It always surprises me how delightful the strong scent from these blossoms can be. Continue reading ‘Orange’
Time to begin a round of planting. It is 7:30am, and I’ve had my morning cup of tea, Continue reading ‘Seeds!’
The camellia bush is happy again this year, putting out lots of smiling faces.
Continue reading ‘White and Green’
I thought I’d share with you a little video of one of my favourite visitors to the garden! These hummingbirds love Mexican sage (salvia leucantha). I grow quite a bit of it, and they flock to it when it starts blooming in the Fall. As I said over a year ago in talking about the sage and the birds, in a post “Soon They Will Come”:
Continue reading ‘Fast Visitor’
Wow! Almost to the day (see last year’s post), they have returned, perhaps stronger than ever! I had two big waves of them this year, one about ten days to a fortnight ago, and another new one starting a couple of days ago. Here’s one:
Flower from my San Pedro cactus (trichocereus pachanoi). (Click for larger view.)
I love these flowers dearly for many reasons. First and foremost, they are beautiful, but there’s an additional enhancement of my love brought about by their short-lived nature. They’ll appear all of a sudden, somewhat unexpectedly, and last just one day Continue reading ‘They’re Back!’
Well, another super-busy week has gone by. Work has been crazy, life has been crazy, and so forth. It is so good to be able to sit here for a while on a sunny Saturday morning and reflect. I thought I’d take you with me on some of the reflections.
The Nobel prizes seemed to come up so much faster this year, and go by even more quickly. I’ve not had as much time to contemplate them as I’d have liked. It was certainly really good to see that the physics one was a celebration of some of the key ideas in my field (see here), of course, but I’d have liked to have had more chatter about all of them, as I usually try to do. It is good to learn more about other things - get out of one’s comfort zone. Two years ago while I was departmental colloquium organizer, I set aside one date to be a colloquium where the three science prizes were highlighted - “Who, What, Why?” There’s always going to be local Continue reading ‘Saturday Calm’
The battle is in full swing, and it is a rather glorious one indeed. What battle? Well, I deployed some ground troops of legendary tenacity to do battle with some ground cover of relentless ivy. I don’t like the ivy much. Since it keeps coming back, and since there is no end to its inventiveness at returning and spreading, I decided to try a different tactic that I knew would have certain other benefits. Deploy the Morning Glory.
I remember my first true appreciation of the powers of morning glories. I was an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky living in a nice cabin with a nice bit of back garden, not far from campus, in Lexington. I’d spend my Summers in New York back in those days. One late spring I planted some morning glory seeds, and watched the little plants that resulted struggle through the dirt and face the sky. Then I was away for the Summer, on my usual (for the time) retreat to the excellent Morningside Heights neighbourhood, the whole of Manhattan my office.
Upon returning to Lexington, finding everything still in the clutches of the humidity that reigns supreme at that time of year, ready to begin teaching in the new Continue reading ‘Glory’
I love the shape of this flower. (Click for larger view.) I don’t know what it is called, but it is morphologically very similar to a Columbine.
The colour is different and it does not seem to open up as much, but I bet they’re cousins. This is also confirmed by a similarity in leaf shape.
I’ve been spotting them occasionally up at around 10,000 ft and above in these Aspen surrounds, in very small quantities.
Somehow their relative rarity (at least here and now) makes them more alluring to me.
-cvj
Dandelion seeds just outside my door. (Click for larger view.) Continue reading ‘Delicate Star’
I don’t know what they’re called [update: glacier lillies*], but they were so lovely, I thought I’d share:
They look a lot like little street lamps, if you look closely, having a lovely curve to their Continue reading ‘Yellow Lamps’
Tassels or Fronds? Can’t decide, but I that know the former is probably the better choice. Either way…
Continue reading ‘Tassels’
I’m repeating myself, I’ve noticed, but it’s ok. Turns out that after I decided today that it was time to post a photo of this lovely flower (click for larger view), I noticed that I’d done exactly the same thing last year, on the same day. It’s the first of the buddleia (budlea) flowers to bloom in the garden, and it’s always a welcome sight. It takes a Continue reading ‘Purple Grand Opening’
Yes, it is that time of year when the city goes purple. Or lavender.
The jacaranda trees go crazy for a while. There are stretches of several blocks long, Continue reading ‘Jacaranda Time!’
Another lovely one in the gladiolus family I think. These have started to put on a show Continue reading ‘Yellow Face’
This particular one -among thousands- called out to me while on the East coast a Continue reading ‘Still Magnolia’
Morning cup of tea, and short reflection - coming up for air before diving back in…
It’s a bit of a mess here, time-wise. Just not enough hours in the day. Everything totally fragmented. Yesterday was grueling… here’s some of it:
Up at 5:30am, finding that I’m immediately thinking about a physics project for a bit (I fell asleep doing so, having been the whole evening in the Casbah drinking coffee and doing the same) before having to break off to get ready, get to office early to start an insanely busy day. Answer a ton of email, and deal with other online stuff, planning to ignore it for the whole rest of morning. Note that flimmaker/journalist friend B has sent me an email with a list of comments and suggested changes to my script for the Video. Got to discuss it with A, my collaborator in Chemistry on this. Whenever are we going to meet in the next few days? Sigh. (Must remember to do blog post about this new project, and how I ended up involved with the Chemistry department!)
After some dithering, decided to drive in, since the plan was to stay super-late and probably involve driving someone home.
Cold as I walk to the office from where I parked on the street. Mostly in my mind, and Continue reading ‘Up for Air’
It is Earth Day today. Here’s a rose from my garden in celebration. The rose crop is fantastic right now…
Are you doing anything special for Earth Day? Links here.
-cvj
It was hard not to notice yellow all over Griffith Park this weekend. There were several Continue reading ‘Yellow Fields’
Spring is in full flow here, and there were lovely contrasts to see on my hike in Griffith Continue reading ‘Renewal’
No doubt about it: Spring has sprung. Whoever says there are no seasons in LA - and there are many who do - have no idea what they are talking about. The signs are in the air - there’s been a distinct change of the smell; lots of flowers are blooming. A parade of displays has begun. These are some of the poppies that are in various corners of the campus here at USC:
Here’s another shot….
Continue reading ‘Spring Sprung’
(Camellia blossoms. Click for larger view.)
Continue reading ‘Camellias’
I decided to do Griffith Park for my Sunday morning hike today. It’s been a while - I’ve mostly been doing Runyon. I thought it would be nice to see how things were doing up there since I last went and saw them dramatically spraying the hydromulch to protect the ground from erosion until regrowth from the fire damage (see here and here). The (very) occasional rain we’ve had in the last couple of months seem to have begun something wonderful - there are hints of green everywhere. I saw this beautiful photograph at one point - which sort of says it all - only to find that my camera (which seems to be on its last legs these last few days) had died again. So I had to take it with my camera phone, and so it is a bit below par:
I think this is wonderful (blurriness aside) - it has the striking image of the burned tree Continue reading ‘Hope Comes in Yellow and Green’
Time for a shot from the garden. Focus could be better. This is from six weeks ago, I admit. I forgot to post this back then. After we had that little bit of rain, various bulbs Continue reading ‘Glad’
I’ve been distracted by several things recently, and so (even more than is usually the case) there’s far more to report than there is time to report it. Among the highlights are, as already mentioned in the comments, a Saturday visit to MOCA (Geffen Contemporary) to see the Takashi Murakami exhibition. (Coinciding nicely with me about to embark upon reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by the other very well known Murakami: Haruki Murakami.)
His simplest motif - which he reuses again and again in many pieces - is the smiling flowers in various colours. The 2D version of the 3D flower box is one of my favourites, and here it is in a room that is wallpapered with the motif. There’s a more solemn one with a range of expressions on the flowers’ faces in an entire field of them (”Kawaii - Vacances”) (including one shedding a tear), but I could not find a good web reproduction of it. The below is a rather small version:
It’s only the second weekend since it opened here in LA and it is hugely popular, with tons of people in the exhibit spaces walking around excitedly and pointing at things. (This being LA, this included a lot of activity in the special Louis Vuitton room, which Continue reading ‘All in a Weekend’s Work and Play’
[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:
Flowers on my San Pedro cactus (trichocereus pachanoi). (Click for larger view.)
Continue reading ‘They’re Here!’
[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:
We had rain again! Quite a big deal here. Well, this meant that some rose bushes that I’d been letting grow well out of control were bent over with the weight of the water. So lots of pruning yesterday. Here’s one of the sweetly scented blooms I harvested along the way:
Continue reading ‘Yellow in Green’
Close shot of what’s been happening all of a sudden on my giant cactus plant since Continue reading ‘Green Towers’
So the mexican sage (salvia leucantha) has started its new crop of flowers. The purple bobs pictured below right 
(click for larger - yes, there is a little bee resting quietly on a leaf there for some reason) will turn into long purple fronds with lots of individual bells containing flowers. Soon they will come, and they will keep coming. They’ll come and examine each flower closely and attentively, and I’ll be waiting for them, since they are so magical - appearing suddenly and dramatically as though dropping out of warp, with a wonderful and powerful hum. I’m talking about hummingbirds, of course. They love these flowers, and come and feed on them regularly.
The warp reference? They are fast - incredibly fast, and they can accelerate and decelerate astonishingly effectively. So if you’re lucky and standing still at the right point, there’ll be a hum and suddenly one Continue reading ‘Soon They Will Come’
Some of the results of last Saturday’s wanderings. The wildflowers are in evidence nearly everywhere you look. Hiking through entire fields of them stretching off into the distance is such a pleasure:
The view toward Snowmass lake (you can just see it) that you can get from being on Continue reading ‘Clearing Out’
Love these. They always look like a clockwork design… But look… five fold symmetry Continue reading ‘Clockwork, No Orange’
Always a big event for me. The first buddleia (or budlea) of the season, in the act of opening up (click for larger):
It should be finished with its grand opening of each of those tiny buds in a few days. I Continue reading ‘Purple Grand Opening’
Aha. 
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