Hibiscus Summer

Posted on July 22, 2024 by admin

Hibiscus are blooming. Since last week. That seems a little early, but I can speculate that the summer’s rains might be at least part of the reason.

Only some of our bushes, however. Mainly the ones that receive extra water when we water the vegetables and flowers, which is usually in the morning and evening. That strengthens my speculation about water, but not enough to do any actual research.

They aren’t our only back-yard glories. We have morning glories rising from seeds my brother Jay gave us some time ago. They grow near the garage.

And more.

Worth the small amount of effort when it comes to watering.

Thursday Bits, Mostly About Death

Posted on July 18, 2024 by admin

Monday’s storms were fierce, all right.

RIP, Bob Newhart. I came along too late to listen to the button-down mind record when new – I learned about it later – so for me Bob played the fellow who walked through Chicago and was a psychologist-chair straight man to a revolving group of eccentrics.

He’s one of the reasons the ’70s was a golden age for sitcoms. As a regular viewer, I must have seen almost all of The Bob Newhart Show. Because I didn’t pay much attention to TV after that decade, I haven’t seen many episodes of Newhart, but maybe now is the time to start.

Speaking of the ’70s, I found this posted online recently.

RIP to all these classmates of mine. The list was compiled by classmates who organize reunions and the like.

A few on the list were good friends of mine, including Kevin Norton and David Bommer. Most of the others I knew, or knew of. For a few I wonder, who was that again? even though AHHS wasn’t that large a high school. About 320 or 330 in the Class of ’79.

I know that because of the astonishing fact – in retrospect, at least to current or recent high schoolers – that periodically the administration would issue every student a GPA card that would not only tell you your exact GPA, but also where you ranked out of those 320 or 330. (I was always near the bottom of the top 10%.)

Twenty-seven names, though probably a few who have passed weren’t listed, so let’s say about 10% of the Class of ’79 is gone. That’s the leading edge of the bell curve of mortality, which will start to expand soon.

But death shouldn’t have the final word, at least not right now. Another way to look at it is that 90% of us have survived those 45 years, mostly as decent folk leading interesting lives, I hope.

Closer to home, in fact at home, how does our garden grow?

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Vietnamese Postcard & Malaysian Aerogram 1994

Posted on July 7, 2024 by admin

On July 6, 1994, I mailed this card from Malaysia. It was a leftover from Vietnam, from which I’d sent some cards in late June.

I don’t remember seeing the upmarket Rex Hotel in Saigon, though perhaps we walked by it. The hotel is still around.

Mainly, the card was about how we weren’t in Vietnam anymore. I wrote: We’re in Georgetown, Penang Island. I didn’t come here two years ago. It has a quiet, pleasant feel so far.

Three days later, I wrote a letter about our time in Vietnam, using a Malaysian aerogram. Do such things even exist any more? I’d rather not find out.

A bit of an education, these aerograms. I didn’t know — and I didn’t remember until I looked at it today — that the hibiscus was the national flower of Malaysia. Specifically, the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. As for the Rafflesia, also known as the stinking corpse lily, it is one bizarre flower.

Fifty Malaysian cents was a deal, though = U.S. 20 cents at the time. That was the same price as a postcard stamp.

In my recollection, Saigon was the opposite of quiet. In the letter I called it a “busy, energetic city.”

One of the things to do there is sit and watch the streets from the sidewalk cafes. You can see whole families balanced on motorcycles, and fewer riders (but not always solo) on bicycles, tricycles, rickshaws, and other motorized thingamabobs, numerous vendors and hawkers, kids kicking balls, idlers, beggars, dogs, cats, and roosters.

Hot Summer Thursday Celosia

Posted on June 20, 2024 by admin

Hot morning followed by light rain this afternoon, with a push of cool air by the evening. That’s a Northern summer for you – not willing to follow through all those hot days with near-hot nights, not at least for more than a few days at a time. Windows will be cracked open this evening.

I opened a fortune cookie the other day, as one does, and it had no fortune in it. That was a first, maybe. Obviously it means no future for me. Ah, well.

Some years ago, I opened a fortune cookie and it said this: “You are about to become $8.95 poorer ($6.95 if you had the buffet).” That was so funny I kept it, and to this day it’s tucked in with my collection of restaurant cards, though not with any particular restaurant, since I don’t remember where I got it.

I’d like to say that I captured these images of such colorful flowers in the wild, or at least in an elegant garden somewhere, but no.

These celosia and other plants were for sale at the garden section of a major multinational retailer.

I didn’t know anything about celosia (cockscomb), so I looked into it when I got home. Lost Crops of Africa notes that it is edible.

“Despite its African origin (a claim that is not without dispute), celosia is known as a foodstuff in Indonesia and India. Moreover, in the future it might become more widely eaten, especially in the hot and malnourished regions of the equatorial zone. It has already been hailed as the often-wished-for vegetable that ‘grows like a weed without demanding all the tender loving care that other vegetables seem to need.’ ”

Gardenia says of celosia: “Leaves, tender stems, and young flower spikes can be eaten boiled or cooked in sauce or stew with other ingredients. The leaves are a nutritious addition to the vegetable garden. They contain high levels of beta-carotene and folic acid.”

It looks like it is making its way onto overpriced menus as food hipsters discover it.

Jardim Botânico de Lisboa

Posted on May 23, 2024 by admin

On the map, the Lisbon Metro station Avenida looks fairly close to the Jardim Botânico de Lisboa. It is, but it turns out to be close to the walled-off backside of the garden. Some serious uphill walking is between you and the Lisbon Botanic Garden’s public entrance, via a twist of small streets and a sizable public staircase.

Not a bad thing, necessarily. We got an up close look at the neighborhood: the tilework, apartments and small shops (including one selling tile to builders), and some of the enormous amount of graffiti that Lisbon sports.

We passed by a few of the many construction projects in the Portuguese capital. Development goes on, despite a recent drop in residential sales in response to higher interest rates, because Lisbon residential properties fetch more than twice what they did 10 years ago, according to Cushman & Wakefield data.

The faux façade draping over this site was amusing. That’s what it will look like, we promise!

A larger development, also apartments.

A redevelopment — tear down — opportunity along the way.

The view from atop one of the public staircases along the way, which is a pedestrian continuation of the street below.

So some effort was expended to get to the garden, but it turned out to be worth it.

That’s how to get off the beaten path. Just a little lateral movement from that path.

Not a lot of the masses of overseas visitors to the city seemed to be at the Lisbon Botanic Garden. The place wasn’t empty, but you could enjoy pleasant walks through the lush springtime greenery without much in the way of crowding. For some reason, we heard more German at the garden than anywhere except Sintra later in the week, where one can hear many European and non-European languages.

It won’t be much of a botanic garden without lots of plants to examine.

Artwork is nestled among the greenery. Or sometimes on the bare patches or in the fallen timbers.

A favorite: ants overrunning a picnic. Really big ones. If ants were actually that big in Portugal, the country might not be such a tourist destination.

“Ants Picnic” by Tara E. Bongard, an Anglo-Portuguese artist.

Toward the end of our visit, I noticed this.

Araucaria Heterophylla: The mighty Norfolk Island pine.

Funny-looking tree, straight up like a pole with ridges. Not true pines, as it happens, and not native outside the South Pacific.

I don’t remember when I heard about them, but hear about them I did, years ago, maybe in one of the histories of Australia that I read. I didn’t think I’d seen one before with my own eyes. There it was. There they were, since the gardens include more than one. Everything else was very nice, but that really made my visit. (Just my visit, no one else was impressed.)

Tyler Rose Garden

Posted on April 24, 2024 by admin

The cliché is to stop and smell the roses, lest you pass your life in drab unappreciation of the delights easily available to you during your short lifespan. It expresses a worthwhile sentiment, almost always meant metaphorically.

At Tyler Rose Garden in Tyler, Texas, smelling the roses is literal. It’s the largest rose garden I’ve ever seen — and according to some sources, the largest such garden in the United States — with some 38,000 bushes representing 600 cultivars on 14 acres.

We arrived late in the warm morning of April 13, the day we left Dallas, on our way to visit an old friend of mine in Nacogdoches, Texas, as well as to (partly) rectify how little time I’ve spent in East Texas, a serious lacuna in my travels. Tyler is just south of I-20 east of Dallas, but not quite on that highway. We headed south on U.S. 69 from I-20 to get there.

Why a rose garden? Turns out Smith County, of which Tyler is the seat, was once the hub of U.S. rose production.

“Large-scale commercial production started in the early 1900s, and in 1917 the first train carload was shipped,” the always informative Texas State Historical Association says. “Droughts, freezes, and disease had destroyed the area’s peach orchards, so the nurserymen were forced to turn to something else. The climate and sandy loams of Smith, Van Zandt, Gregg, Cherokee, Harrison, and Upshur counties proved excellent for this type of horticulture, and large-scale commercial rose growing centered there.”

By the end of the 20th century, domestic and foreign competition had eaten into Texas’ market share for roses, but they are still grown in the area.

The day we came to Tyler was warm and clear, just right for a stroll among the roses of a free municipal garden.

And take time to look closely at – and of course – smell the roses. Watch out for bees, though.

It isn’t all roses.

“Let’s spell out Tyler in big metal letters, but leave out the Y.”

“Why?”

“Right, Y.”

But why?”

“Yes, Y.”

“Huh?”

And so on. A clever idea, whoever thought it.

Bob Link Arboretum

Posted on February 28, 2024 by admin

Bob Link died just over 20 years ago, and I never met him. But I’ve walked in his arboretum.

Scant information about Bob Link is readily online: an obituary and a mention at a local history web site, the local in that case being Schaumburg Township. But I can surmise that he started planting woody plants on his family’s property in the township, as a hobby. Later the park district acquired the site, incorporating it into Spring Valley – off in a corner, near a major road, only accessible by footpath.

We arrived on Sunday afternoon. Not many other people were around, though there was a young woman in a bright blue coat who had climbed a sizable tree away from the arboretum and was resting where a large branch parted from the main trunk. Didn’t look that comfortable to me, but she looked relaxed, at least at a distance. She’s not in my pics.

Most first-page search engine hits about the arboretum are limited to detailing its short trail and location in a corner of Spring Valley. An obscure place, and better for it. Winter, and not bad for that. A brown-gray-yellow mix, thick with plants who haven’t been fooled by faux spring this year. Signs identify species at Bob Link. A selection: Purple-leaved Sand Cherry, Dwarf Bush Honeysuckle, Hackberry, White Pine, Gingko, Wahoo.

The gingko in silhouette.

The species has seen ’em, and seen ’em go, at least according to the sign. Fossil gingko leaves 150 million years old are known to science.

Evergreens.

The White Pine and Colorado Spruce, respectively. The spruce is native to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, notes Wiki, and has wider fame as Christmas trees. My impulse was to put a few decorations on this tree, but not cut it down or anything. No go. I hadn’t brought any Christmas ornaments with me for some reason.

Thursday Rolls Around Again

Posted on October 5, 2023 by admin

Lilly’s been in town for a few days. We’re glad to see her, as always. We’re glad to eat sushi with her, as always.

Another big thing this week is that I got a new phone. Today. With a new carrier. Apparently my old phone was old indeed, since I bought it so I could take it to Mexico City. Soon after that, I discovered the highest and best use for a mobile phone: pulling up Google Maps.

Lately the old phone had been showing its mechanical senility by disconnecting at inconvenient times. This happened more and more often, until it was completely unreliable. One of the last messages that got through, yesterday, was the modern version of the Emergency Broadcast System: The National Wireless Emergency Alert System.

Or Sistema Nacional de Altera Inalambrica de Emergencia.

The sound was jarring, as I expect it’s supposed to be. I wonder how cacophonous a big room full of phones was — say a classroom that doesn’t make its students turn off their devices.

A presidential alert, no less. I like to think that FEMA technicians brought a suitcase to the Oval Office, opened it up, and President Biden pushed a button inside to set off the alert. Maybe a blue button, since a red button might be on the nuclear football, and set off something else all together.

Temps cooled down today after overnight rain. No freezes yet, so we still have flowers in the back yard.

The Flowers of October. That has to be the title of something.

Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve

Posted on October 2, 2023 by admin

On Saturday, we made our way to the edge of Lake Michigan.

We’d come on the sunny last day of September to Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve, a unit of the Lake County Forest Preserve District. For a little more than a century, the U.S. Army maintained a presence at Fort Sheridan and in surrounding acreage for a shifting variety of uses, until base closure turned the site mostly over the private development, with a relatively small slice added to the forest preserve system.

The decommissioning was in the 1990s. I remember writing about the redevelopment, but after I quit much local reporting about the Chicago area ca. 2005, I tucked whatever I knew about Fort Sheridan in a remote filing cabinet in my memory. That is, I forgot it until not long ago, when I noticed the forest preserve on a map – a paper map – and determined to go, since we were due for lunch with Wendy and Ted later in the day in Evanston anyway.

This forest preserve is only partly forest. We took short trails through prairie.

A ravine runs through it.

Coloration has started.

Barely but vividly.

Mid-September Sights

Posted on September 14, 2023 by admin

Chilly nights, warm days. Such are conditions here in Illinois not long before the fall equinox. The trees are still holding on to their leaves, including our quaking aspen.

Goldenrod, seen here in the back 40 of my yard – that is, the back 40 square feet or so, and how is it farmers had back 40s? Something to do with a quarter of a quarter section, which would be 40 acres, though I expect the metaphorical sense long ago superseded the literal one.

Out on a northwest suburban street.

It isn’t until Saturday, but some local motorists have been ready for Mexican Independence Day since last weekend.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Flora