Places

October 3, 2011

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More Water Lilies Than I Have Ever Seen in My Life

Towards the end of our Thailand excursion, we flew to Chiang Mai, a northern city that is situated in the mountains. It was the part of the trip I was most looking forward to and turned out to be the city (next to Bangkok) that I would be most interested in revisiting to explore further.

Our second destination in Chiang Mai (after the Orchid Farm and lunch) was the Queen Sirikit Botanic Garden. Unfortunately, we were allotted a paltry 40 minutes to explore the gardens and greenhouses of this expansive botanical attraction. Note to media tour operators: garden writers require ample time to explore botanical gardens! Imagine a time frame and then double it. No, triple it. Actually, just give us the entire day.

The race was on to see as much as possible before being called back onto the bus. Because time was precious, I chose to focus on a few of the greenhouses and forgo the outdoor gardens. Before heading into the first greenhouse I took in a field of large bowl ponds. Each pond housed a different tropical water lily, in an astonishing array of leaf and flower shapes, sizes, and colours. I had no idea there were so many different types!

Nymphaea ‘Chalong Kwan’
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September 28, 2011

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Close, Far, Farthest: Diminutive Orchids

This cluster of hanging baskets photographed in the Tropical High Elevation House at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens harbours a secret. It took three trips to the room before we spotted them.

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July 26, 2011

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A Few Film Photos Taken in the Alpine Garden at the Denver Botanic

The large inflorescence in the background of this photo belongs to Agave parryi, an agave that can be hardy to -18C (according to “High and Dry: Gardening with Cold-Hardy Dryland Plants” by Robert Nold), depending on the growing conditions. Recently, I have been learning about some of the hardier agaves and was pleased to see a few at the Denver Botanic Gardens that were not only over-wintered outdoors, but in bloom.

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July 25, 2011

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Alpine Flowers at Mount Evans, Colorado

As promised, a follow-up post of closeup shots taken at the Mount Goliath alpine garden. While I had to exclude hundreds of shots to keep this post within reason, I still managed to go overboard with over 30 images. As a result, I have embedded a slideshow so that those of you with a slow connection are not left trying to load this page for the next week.

I’ve identified as many plants as possible. If you’d like to know the names, click through to their Flickr page.

[Note: For some reason the images are compressed in the slideshow in a way that makes them look very low res. Until I can resolve the issue, I'd suggest taking a look at the original images as they look okay in that version. Sorry about that!]

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July 14, 2011

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Above the Tree Line

How cool to be so high I could actually see where the trees stopped. Just like that. No more trees.

While in Denver, a friend of ours (thanks Ross!) generously offered to take us up to Mt. Goliath, an alpine area that is managed by the Denver Botanic Gardens.

As an alpine plant fan this was a big deal for me and I even planned the trip (in part) based on when a good number of the alpines would be blooming at that elevation. They did not disappoint.

Some Brief Stats: When we set out that morning, Denver was already a blazing 95°F or so and the altitude 5,280 feet above sea level. As the car climbed Mt. Evans on the way to Mt. Goliath, the temperature dipped below 60°F and the altitude was somewhere around 12,000 feet! We never did make it to the very top of Mt. Evans (14,240 feet), but we did get high enough to touch snow and it was cool enough to require a change into long sleeved shirts and socks.

This is the view at Summit Lake, a stop that is just below the peak. This panoramic is an amalgam of images that I took with my cellphone. I also brought a film panoramic camera… someday I will process that film and post them here. Some. Day. As I’ve said before, I’ve got a film backlog dating to 2008 (and countless trips) so I have no illusions about when they will see the light of day.