what about the plastic animals?

Friday Flowers

A few more pictures from the New York Botanical Garden.

Time for a break as I use up the last of my vacation days for fiscal year 2007.  Back in a week or so.

Aeonium arboreum var. holochrysum

One of the plants being exhibited as part of the Darwin's Garden show at the New York Botanical Garden. This particular plant is from the Canary Islands.  Whenever I see an interesting plant like this I am reminded of the last sentence in The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

On this day in 1974, baseball in Cleveland hits a low point when Ten Cent Beer Night gets ugly.  In the early 1990s I went to see an Indians game at Municipal Stadium.  There were about 5,000 people in a stadium that seated 74,000.  It was strange.  I moved around from inning to inning, visiting pretty much every section of the park.

Bee and Flowers

This took a little patience.

Signs of Spring

The daffodils are slowly beginning to emerge in Morningside Park.  The snow drops are in bloom as well.  Spring can't be too far away.

John T. Brush Stairway update:  The City Room blog at the New York Times wrote about the same Polo Grounds stairway that I presented here last week.

Saturday at the Greenmarket

Activity at the Union Square Greenmarket really dies out after Christmas.  There were a lot fewer vendors there this morning.  The pickings get a bit slim as well.  Apples, pears, squash and root vegetables will be the produce choices until spring comes around.  Oddly, I didn't get any produce this morning.  Plenty of dairy:  milk, chocolate milk, buttermilk, cream and ricotta.  Plus eggs, leaf lard and apple cider.  The buttermilk, eggs and lard are going into a ginger-buttermilk pie.  Not sure what I'm going to do with the ricotta, it was an impulse purchase.  Not sure why I bought the heavy cream either, but it seemed necessary at the time.

Bridge of Flowers

Let's take a trip on the wayback machine!  To clear up space on my MacBook I've been burning photos to CDs (they're already backed-up to an external hard drive) and deleting them.  In doing so I was reminded of a whole bunch of photos from a trip I took to Vermont and Massachusetts in August 2006.

The Bridge of Flowers is located in Shelburne Falls, MA.  The bridge was built in 1908 to carry a trolley across the Deerfield River.  The trolley shut down 20 years later. Since the town's water main ran across it, the town quickly bought the bridge.  Private money was raised by the next year to plant the 400 ft. span with flowers.  The Bridge of Flowers is mostly maintained by volunteers.  I doubt it looks all that great in late-November, but it sure was pretty in August.

Beneath the falls there is an excellent example of glacial potholes, where rocks embedded at the bottom of a glacier grind out holes in the bedrock.  Elsewhere in town is the only remaining trolley car (restored) from the bridge, a few really nice used bookstores, a great-looking old movie theater that I wanted to see a movie in but I was there at noon and couldn't stay 'til evening, and a deli/health food store where I bought a tasty chicken sandwich.  There were also several art galleries and artsy-craftsy stores.

Saturday Morning at the Greenmarket

Heirloom tomatoes

Mini eggplants

Sunflowers

A few sights from Saturday morning's visit to the greenmarket.  It's that time of year when baskets are overflowing with produce.  I didn't get any of the pictured items.  Instead I got blueberries, peaches, sweet corn, milk; and for tomato sauce:  San Marzano tomatoes, green frying peppers, white onions and oregano.

Cyclists and Flowers

I rode my bike through Central Park on Sunday morning and walked through most of the park that afternoon.  The high tree pollen count and aerobic exercise is not the best combination!  Aside from that it was a beautiful day for a ride in the park and to take pictures of random cyclists.  Around 92nd Street a woman asked me what cross street we were near.  There was a chestnut tree, like the one above, in bloom and she wanted to know where to come in the fall when the buckeyes would be on the ground.

It's vacation time!  I'll be out of touch until at least next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Spring

Happy first day of spring!

For your amusement: 

Every fire escape in SoHo (via Gothamist), and Shorpy, the 100-year old photoblog, includes the dapper rat catcher and the rat collector, 1908.

Daffodils in Bloom

I can't believe I missed this.  A few feet away from the emerging daffodils in Morningside Park is an entire grove of daffodils in bloom.  As someone with a bit of education in weather and climate I know enough to not attribute this winter's lack of winter on global warming.  However, the extreme unusualness of the recent warm weather (24 straight days above normal, on half those days the lows have been at least as warm as the normal highs), and the sight of flowers blooming in early-January does make a person worry that these are ominous signs of things to come.

That last picture is of a dandelion, not a daffodil.  Don't think that I don't know the difference!  It and a bunch of clover were blooming in the little triangle of land north of the Grant Memorial.

Fame!  I'm quoted in an article about weather blogging in the current issue of Weatherwise.   Such words of wisdom.