July 9

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In the last several weeks, he has decided that the couches are too high to jump up on.

Luckily, there is a folded-up comforter on the floor.

You can see there is still someone home.

Lilies, on the way to yoga.

Summer sky over West Park.

Flowers in West Park.

Duck, muskrat, and tons of goldfish in the pond at West Park.

Someone was tossing bread into the pond.  The muskrat is holding bread with its little hands....  Utterly surrounded by goldfish............

Evrbody love bread.....  Note the boil of goldfish, lower right.....  Muskrat at left, and ducks, upper right.

Walking home after yoga.  Yellow lilies.

Oh my.  Brand new baby ducks, in July.  I surely hope they have enough time to get big enough to fly, before winter.................  We counted 9, several times.

On the other side of the pond, there was another mom with tiny new babies.  Wow.  I surely hope all these new little ones have a chance to grow up, big and strong.



THESE are what I think this year's ducks ought to look like....  These are the "teenager" ducks that were the two little ducks we've been watching..........  They aren't as big as their mom, quite, but they nearly are.

Walking on out of the park.  Evening sun on leaves.

Hey!  One last baby frog.

This one was a little bigger than the ones we'd seen before.  Wishing it good luck, too.  It's not an easy world for tiny new frogs or tiny new ducks..............

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July 8

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It thundered a bit, on the 8th, so I had the computers turned off and unplugged.  What to do, what to do....  I know.  I'll clean the fan.  It was pretty dirty..............

Here it is, after 40 minutes of disassembly and scrubbing.

Reassembled, reinstalled in the window. MUCH better.

Later.  Walking.

I do not know what this is.  It wasn't a thistle.....

Bee balm from the side.

Bee balm from the top.

Old-fashioned daylilies.  I believe I've seen more of them this year than ever before.  More happier, bigger, patches of old-fashioned daylilies.  Nothing wrong with that!

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July 7

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Orange lilies, coming up through a low evergreen.

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July 6 -- back to the botanical garden, part 4

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Hooray -- we found this plant on the ground level.

And here, I believe, is its info tag.

More flowers -- these are big.  As big as my hand, I bet.  This flower was tastefully placed here, on a wall.

We started looking around for the plant that produced that flower.

Goodness.  LOTS of hangy-downy things, with buds, flowers, incipient fruits...  Those big brown things are maturing fruits.  I wonder what they look like inside.........

Now these are cool.  Twisty end-of-leaf things.

Cool again.....  The tag (which I've cropped out) says "beehive ginger."  These are about a yard tall.

Many buds, and RED flowers.

Speaking of flowers.

I've never seen anything like this!  The tag said Bat Flower.  This is large.  Those leaves are over a yard long, and I bet those white stringy things are pushing a yard.  I've never seen anything like this before.  I wonder what the purpose of those white strings is......

So interesting -- the agave gets all the hype, but the Rangoon creeper has more and more colorful (and more beautifully scented?) flowers, and here's the bat flower blooming in an extremely spectacular way, but do the Rangoon creeper or the bat flower get any press?  There was no mention of them on the Botanical garden "what's blooming" page..........  I think maybe they need a volunteer to keep track of what's going on and update their website!  If I could get there without a car, I might think about volunteering to do that!



Looking down at anthurium, which has bindweed wrapped around its flower stem.

Looking at another anthurium from the side.

Bromeliads.

We looked at this one on May 30, and here it is again.

We looked at this one on May 30, too.

This is the same cacao tree we looked at from above and behind.  It is blooming, too.  Little bitty white flowers, coming right out of the trunk. 

I am told that this is how cacao does business -- flowers and new pods developing, all year 'round.  Thank you, cacao trees everywhere, from all of us chocolate lovers!

And thus endeth our July 6 trip to the Botanical Garden.

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July 6 -- back to the botanical garden, part 3

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Looking down at a cacao tree from the walkway.  See the two orange pods hanging off the trunk, upper right quadrant?

I wonder if this opened up a lot more, or if this was as open as it was going to get.

These are cashews.  What we read is that the actual nut is in that cashew-nut-shaped thing below the "apple"  Doesn't it seem weird that the apples grow and grow, but the nut part apparently stays about the same?  Curious.

Looking down at huge bromeliads.  These are at least a yard tall.  Maybe four feet or so.

Oh my.  I think this is my favorite plant of July 6.  This smells amazing.  Fruity, floral.....  Wonderful.  Love this plant.  (And -- here's a look at one of the walkways I've been talking about.)

All that fuss made over the agave, but this................  Wow.............

We tore ourselves away from the red and pink extravaganza, with the intent to look, at ground level (where it is planted), to see if we could figure out what it was.



Walking on.  Really big fern.  I know I've read that there were tree-sized ferns in the age of the dinosaurs.  Perhaps this is their smaller descendant.

Waterfall.  With bromeliads on top.

Humming "Incense, peppermints" under my breath.................

They really have a very nice collection of bromeliads!

Someone has a sense of humor..............

More bromeliads.

Now we are back on ground level, in the temperate section.

This sign went with the little guy(s?) above.......  Good luck, little one(s).  I hope you thrive here........

We saw this mango tree on the 30th.  The mangoes are bigger now...........  The biggest of these was less than 3" long, if I remember correctly.

Like the red with the green...........

Another look at the succulents under the kaleidoscopes.

This one was labeled "tree fern"........

A closer look at its new leaf..........

A ferny ground cover.  This was no more than a foot tall.

Here's a glance at the interesting collection of epiphytes from southeast Asia that we looked at on May 30.  A lot of very different-looking objects...........

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