New travels, new ideas

Note 1: I will be traveling in Egypt the next two weeks, so the next post will not appear for three weeks or so.  

Note 2: I put up a new photo for the heading.  It is from roughly the same location, but it shows the new gardens along the edge of the back lawn.  However, I am having trouble getting the entire photo to appear, so one has to move the horizontal bar to move the photo for a full view.

     In December I went to Easter Island, as well as Patagonia (both Chile and Argentina).  I got, I think, a neat idea when visiting a site where it was shown how the indigenous people of Easter Island protected their garden plants from strong winds and the porous (continued below photos)

volcanic soils.  They built rocks around their plants.  I liked the look of that, so this year I will try to create a small garden like that in what I call my Hedgerow Garden, along my driveway.  The first photo shows where I will do that, closer to the road.

     Most of the photos show some interesting vegetation on Easter Island.  The third last photo shows one of the toughest plants I have ever seen, able to tolerate the dry rock surface under the equatorial sun. The last two show the beautiful lupines, both cultivated and wild, that bloom in Patagonia throughout their summer.  It's funny how I have never been impressed with lupines in gardens here at home--but how much I love them there.