December 3, 2009
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Daily Botanical

Flowering Tillandsia

Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved

I know, I know. More tropical plant photos and I haven’t even left yet. And it is snowing outside your window. How much more of this can you take?

I’m a jerk. Sorry.

One of the nicer aspects of being dumped three hours away from the hotel we thought we had booked and into a part of Cuba we knew absolutely nothing about was that the hotel, which in many respects embodied several of my resort nightmares, had their own botanical garden AND a food garden that supplied some of the hotel’s produce. This made me very happy. The obnoxious racket of pool bingo blaring over the loudspeaker and drowning out the soothing sounds of tropical birds and the crashing of ocean waves: not so much.

Here’s some pretty tillandsia, a fascinating group of plants that never fails to take my breath away.

And here are some more pictures I have taken on various occasions:

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December 3, 2009
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Links Published

Storefront Gardens

Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved

My pal Barry and I started a new, collaborative internet website (aka “blog” if you must) called Storefront Gardens, documenting the various shop window gardens we pass by in our day-to-day lives and travels.

Recently, while enjoying our new favourite espresso-based coffee beverage, cortados, we discovered a mutual fascination for these unusual botanical window displays. From the well-tended to the ratty disasters, we seem to love them all.

In a moment of caffeine-induced insanity, because what I need just before a big trip is ANOTHER project, I proclaimed that, “We should document them and start a blog about it!”

And then we did.

Thanks to Davin, my number one enabler, who went ahead and registered the site AND designed it for us.

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