Louisiana calling

     I recently visited two beautiful and interesting locales in Louisiana.  I visited them both in the 1990s, and they deserved a repeat visit.

     The first, Longue Vue Gardens, is in New Orleans.  The house and gardens were developed from 1924 to the 1930s.  It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2005.

     The second is the Atchafalaya Swamp, about a hundred miles west of New Orleans.  Two levees were built alongside it in the 1930s to prevent flooding following a devastating flood in 1927.  It is 2200 square miles in size, and it is primarily populated with bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum).  Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneiodes), an epiphyte, commonly grows on the trees, and it was harvested by the Cajun people (French people originally from Nova Scotia in the 1760s) for use as car seat stuffing, diapers, and many other uses.

Curiosities of Egypt

     Recently I was in Egypt, one of my favorite places in the world.  I found a few interesting plants there, in spite of the desert conditions.

     The first photo is of a shrub inside St. Katharine Monastery, built in the 6th Century.  Its location is at the spot where Moses is believed to have received the Ten Commandments on top of nearby Mt. Sinai.  He first was supposed to have received directions from God after he was drawn to a "burning bush" that was not consumed by fire.  This shrub is believed by many to be that same bush, alive after all the years since that event.  It is Rubus ulmifolius sanctus, the last epithet reflecting its religious significance.  Who knows for sure?   

   The next two photos of a tree in a park in the city of Aswan appears to be in the family Leguminaceae.  I thought the stem growing out of the trunk was interesting.

   The next two photos are of a neat desert shrub that I do not recognize.  I would appreciate an ID.

   I thought the last photo was kind of cute, with a statue of King Ramses II having a "halo" of palm leaves.  It was taken in the famous Karnak Temple in the city of Luxor.

Still more bricks

     I've collected over 5000 antique paving bricks originally used for streets in the early 1900s.  I found another use for them last fall, building a new planter between my back lawn and the shaded gardens towards the back of the lot.  I removed some Stephanandra incisa 'crispa' (Cutleaf Stephandra) and extended the existing planter, shown in the first photo.

     My wife always thought it would be fitting for me to be buried somewhere in my gardens, so I did a test, finding that the planter looked very much like a burial vault.  So, who knows?

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.

So much fun

     Late last summer I built a new hardscape structure (I still don't know what to call it) that was one of the most enjoyable projects I did in my 50 years of gardening.  It turned out completely different than I first envisioned, just evolving as I built it.  It was first going to be a rectangular planter built with recycled street granite cobblestones.  But then I collected some weathered limestone rocks that I used elsewhere in the gardens last summer and which appeared in earlier posts.  So I started to build it with those instead of the granite cobblestones.  However, I ran short, so I altered the design, abandoned the idea of a planter, so the structure became "hollow" rather than filled, and changed what I planned to do for a bench as well as its location, moving it from the front to the back.  All these changes, as I went through them, were just so enjoyable that I was almost giddy.  Finally, adding the moss and other plants were the final experience of immense joy.