Tag Archives: flowers

Odes to Everyday Things from Every Continent

In the spirit of Pablo Neruda’s marvelous poetry about ordinary things, we’ve compiled a photo essay spanning the seven continents. Plato taught us long ago, that the “beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.” Let’s take a moment to celebrate the design of everyday things.

 


 

Africa: Ostrich Egg

Homes all over South Africa include ostrich eggs in their array of objet d’ -art and it’s easy to see why. Perfected by nature, oversized ovals are a unique surface for artisans to decorate. Enameled, painted, or even untouched, save for a stand, the results are astounding.

 

South Africa ostrich eggs
Photo by: flickr/Redmond licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

Antarctica: Ice

Contemplating the ice of Antarctica is a meditation in white. Something commonly thought of as one color, is in the purity of the Arctic landscape, many, many hues. Behold shades of ghostwhite, floralwhite, ivory, lavenderblush; yes, lavenderblush, all in sheets and bergs of ice.

 

Antarctica ice
Photo by: stocksnap.io/Casey Kiernan licensed under CC0 1.0

 

Asia: Bangles

Among the most beautiful creations in all corners of the Indian subcontinent are stalls of shimmering, fragile, glassy, colorful bangles sold by the dozen. A proper “sleeve” of bangles requires at least three dozen bangles. Since they’re glass, they’re expected to break. Shattering one by one, it’s time for another visit to the bazaar when they’ve all broken away.

 

bangles
Photo by: flickr/Garry Knight licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

Australia: Didgeridoo

Indigenous Australians created this exquisite instrument almost 1500 years ago from hollowed out tree limbs. How does one hollow out tree limbs? Termites do it for you. Decorative motifs vary depending on the provenance of the person making the instrument, and makes for a variety of styles and sounds. Its familiar droning is inextricably linked to the culture and people Down Under.

 

Australia Didgeridoo

 


 

Europe: Tulips

It’s a flower so gorgeous it inspired a frenzy in the 1600s. Legend has it that at the height of their value, certain tulip bulbs commanded prices 10 times the yearly income of a skilled craftsman! To this day, economists use the phrase “tulip mania” when speaking about fluctuations in the intrinsic value of goods in the marketplace.

tulips
Photo by: pixabay under license CC0 1.0

 

North America: Maple Syrup

During early European colonization in northeastern North America, indigenous peoples taught arriving colonists how to harvest sap for survival. Many years later, Civil War abolitionists opted to use maple syrup rather than southern sugar cane. And during WWII, maple syrup was the go-to sweetener in a time of increased rations. This is a flapjack syrup with some serious historical cred.

 

maple syrup
Photo by Unsplash/ Sonja Langford

 

South America: Caipirinhas

The classic libation of Brazil that’s as fun to drink as it is to say: KAI-PE-REEN-YA. A refreshing concoction that goes great with Rio’s hot, hot, hot beaches. You can order them with a variety of fruits like pineapples, grapes or strawberries but we recommend taking it classic: a little lime juice, cachaça (sugar cane hard liquor) and a hint of sugar. Saude!

caipirinha
Cachaca Dave/under license GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0, Wikimedia Commons

These American Botanical Gardens Will Give You Spring Fever

If there’s ever a season punctuated by flowers, it’s spring. After shaking off winter’s hold, nature has burst back into life with balmy weather, perfume clouds, and falling petals. Whether you’re interested in seeing the bulbs that have started peeking through the dirt, indulging in fruits and veggies that are straight from the vine, or getting up close and personal with exotic plants that can bite, there’s no better time to visit a botanical garden than springtime, even though many are open year-round, thanks to greenhouse magic.

From Atlanta’s thousands of orchids to Arizona’s cacti collections, these five botanical gardens are sure to give you spring fever—anytime of year.

 

The Desert Botanical Garden

Phoenix, Arizona

Desert Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of The Desert Botanical Garden

 

In North America’s hottest desert, there’s a 140-acre oasis, where giant cacti, century plants—slow-growing succulents that bloom only once in their lifetimes—and milkweed erupt from cinnamon-red buttes. Here, among paved paths and numerous hiking trails, wildflowers pop up from the sand in a rainbow of colors, especially if there’s been a little bit of rain.  Thousands of butterflies native to the Southwest bandy under a covered pavilion. During the spring, jazz, R&B, and classical music waft across The Desert Botanical Garden. There are also rotating exhibitions by artists like Larry Kornegay and Carolina Escobars that blend in so seamlessly with the Sonoran Desert, they look like they’ve just sprouted up on their own.

Desert Botanical Garden1
Photo courtesy of The Desert Botanical Garden

 

The Topiary Park

Columbus, Ohio

The Topiary Park
Photo courtesy of Friends of the Topiary Park

 

Molded from yew shrubs, 67 topiaries reaching 12 feet tall transform this seven-acre downtown park in Columbus, Ohio, into a living sculpture garden. The brainchild of local artist James T. Mason—who shaped the bronze frames and planted the associated greenery—and his then-wife Elaine, who served as the original topiarist, it includes traditional park features: sidewalks, benches, picnic tables, flower beds, and a man-made lake, where boat-shaped topiaries float beside water lilies.

Topiary Park
Photo courtesy of Friends of the Topiary Park

The Topiary Park’s centerpiece, an interpretation of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, is a collection of men, women, children, and petsthat’s believed to be the only topiary version of a painting in existence.  “The Topiary Park is a landscape of a painting of a landscape,” Mason says. “It plays upon the relationships between nature, art, and life.”

 

Atlanta Botanical Garden

Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Botanical Garden

 

At the Atlanta Botanical Garden, there’s a 12-foot-wide, 600-foot-long suspension bridge that floats among the branches of oaks, hickories, and poplars.  Here, in the Storza Woods, 40 feet above a patchwork of azaleas, camellias, and trillium, pairs of red-tailed hawks perch on the lowest branches,  waiting to snag squirrels and songbirds.

Atlanta Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Botanical Garden

Nearby, in the Cascades Garden, a 25-foot Earth Goddess, whose floral locks turn into ice during the winter, strains water through her hand.  At the Fuqua Orchid Center, 2,000 species of orchids from Asia, Madagascar, Ecuador, Australia, Central America, and Mexico—the largest collection of its kind in the country—blossom in a startling array of colors and shapes. The Atlanta Botanical Garden also boasts an Edible Garden and Outdoor Kitchen where Atlanta’s top chefs present cooking classes and the Garden Chef showcases seasonal recipes using colorful vegetables, from orange cauliflower in spring to purple beans and burgundy okra in the summer to a kaleidoscope of apples, pears, figs, blueberries, raspberries in the fall.

 

San Francisco Botanical Garden

San Francisco, California

San Fransico Botanical Garden1
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Botanical Garden

The San Francisco Botanical Garden is a 55-acre plant sanctuary, featuring both landscaped gardens and open spaces within the Golden Gate Park.   Its mild Mediterranean climate coupled with its famous coastal fog provides the right conditions to grow and conserve plant from “biodiversity hotspots”, like Australia, Chile, and South Africa, that are rapidly losing ground and are in danger of extinction.

San Fransico Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Botanical Garden

In early spring, the branches of 100 magnolia trees burst into a profusion of saucer-sized pink, white, and magenta flowers. Dinosaur food—a prehistoric-looking plant that has monster-sized leaves with teeth on their undersides, commonly thought of as Giant rhubarb—runs along the edge of the Ancient Garden. In the summer, pocket handkerchief trees, native to woodlands in central China, sprout red flowers that are framed by large white bracts, which dangle from the tree like large, white handkerchiefs. In the fall, Angel’s Trumpet blooms with dramatic, pendulous, fragrant flowers in a variety of colors, encouraging the activity of nectar-seeking birds and bees throughout the winter.

 

Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden

Dallas, Texas

Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden

 

A 66-acre floralparadise on the shores of White Rock Lake, the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden is one of the most beautiful and top display gardens in North America, attracting more than a million visitors from all 50 states, as well as 90 countries, each year. A 15-minute drive from downtown Dallas, this city landmark has 19 specialty gardens.  Highlights include A Tasteful Place—a 3.5-acre garden teeming with fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers, and herbs—and A Woman’s Place, where there’s a native Texas limestone bridge, a 140-foot hanging garden, and a wellspring surrounded by towering Dawn Redwoods.  “A cousin to the California redwoods…[Dawn redwoods] they were thought to be extinct, but were found in a remote valley in California,” says Dave Forehand, vice president of gardens. “Pacific redwoods won’t grow here, but these are more adapted. They’re not as tall; they do get wide in diameter.”

Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden

Named the second most-breathtaking garden in the world by Architectural Digest, ranking high among the likes of gardens in Versailles and Rio de Janeiro, the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden has rotating seasonal festivals four times per year. During Dallas Blooms in the spring, 500,000 spring-blooming bulbs burst through the soil. Summertime starts “Garden Gigs”, where you can bask in the magic of live music at twilight.During Autumn at the Arboretum, there’s the internationally acclaimed Pumpkin Village, featuring more than 90,000 pumpkins, squash, and gourds. The winter brings the 12 Days of Christmas, which features a dramatic 25-foot-tall glass gazebo filled with charming costumed characters and strung with 500,000 lights.

The Magnificent Beauty of Death Valley’s Super Bloom

After spending the winter in a snow-blanketed mountain town, trapped in by icy roadways, we finally broke free from the winter gloom. We ran towards the desert like there was no other escape from the clinching cold and snow, bounded away from the white encrusted ground, in search of yellower pastures in the desert bloom.

Death Valley National Park was our final destination, where we were to watch the dry Earth give birth.

In October 2015, a flood hit Death Valley after a three-year drought in California. The land, usually a basin for only two to three inches of rainfall a year, received three inches of rain in merely five hours. This rare El Nino weather pattern created the perfect condition for over 20 species of wildflowers to grow in enormous numbers, a phenomenon known as the Super Bloom. The last time this occurrence appeared in the valley was in 2005.

amargosa super bloom
Amargosa Opera House | Photo: Desdemona Dallas

After a 10-hour car ride, we arrived at the Amargosa Opera House for our first night in the desert. Murals of old characters lined the walls of the dilapidating inn. Its owner, a 93-year-old retired Broadway dancer, keeps the Opera House alive. She’s one of the few brave enough to search for her destiny in the driest, hottest place on the continent, just like the wild flowers, growing through the rough.

In the morning, the cold that had wrapped our bones for months unraveled and melted onto the desert floor, luring us further into the park. Waving goodbye to the last bits of civilization, we drove onward in hopes that we could find ourselves amongst the flowers.

The blossoms we were in search of live short, fleeting lives of ephemeral beauty, blooming only a few days before returning to sow their seeds back into the dusty carpet of Death Valley. Oh, what lies latent beneath the Earth’s crust! If a carpet of flowers can emerge from the Valley of Death what else can grow from an incubation of rock and sand?

flowers super bloom
Photo: Desdemona Dallas

The park rangers tip us off to head towards Badwater Basin, saving us from the Disney-land like maze of tourist traps. The basin is the lowest elevation in North America, and most lush point of the Superbloom, or so we had been told.

flower super bloom
Photo: Desdemona Dallas

In a thick sea of flowers, cameras and tourists, we tried to find sanctuary in the efflorescence, soaking in a sight, removed, yet surrounded by the all-encompassing landscapes. Just like the others who had embarked on the pilgrimage to the bloom, we filled ourselves with smells, colors, and photographs, enough to remember that it happened once our memories fade. Our flower and sun appetite satiated, we piled back into the car, sure that we had seen the bloom we drifted quietly along the road, ready to find a place to rest our heads.

flower super bloom
Photo: Desdemona Dallas

The desert heat woke us, stoking us with a relentless hunger to seize the day. We cruised through the park on a strange journey through tourism and establishment into deserted nothing. Large expanses of land, full of human traces, yet seemingly untouched, unfolded in front of us for miles. Neon-clad strangers walked by without smiles in the isolating vastness. The harshness of the desert’s dry heat wore away at the tendons of our road trip relations, coaxing our fears out of their subconscious caverns to rip at the seams of our experience.

With thoughts of a desert escape, we rolled through the park, ignoring the sign that clearly stated the road was closed. Desert Golden’s yellow bloom surrounded us. A painted mars-like landscape breathed life into a colorful mirage of endless yellow, blanketing a desert carpet. Coasting out of the tourist-entrapped park, we were surprised as we realized we had only skimmed the surface of the bloom at Badwater.

flower super bloom
Photo: Desdemona Dallas

The flowers tantalized us, floating in the gentle evening wind, beckoning us to run in their beauty. The sun tucked behind the rocky mountainside and at that moment the true bloom appeared, flowers upon flowers abounding in front of us upon hundreds of acres of yellow buds.

Rushing out of the car, astonished laughter reverberated our bodies and tired souls into an ecstatic and sudden awakened sensation. Our feet were colored with yellow pollen and the intoxicating smell released into the twilight. We run through the thick scent of honey, the golden-evening primroses lavish me with the laughter of their essence.

flower super bloom
Photo: Desdemona Dallas

The fleeting momentary spark of something that just slipped from your grasp moves through the desert winds like the scents of flowers under our noses. We hold onto this moment forever, yet it crumbles through our fingers at its indescribable nature.

Orion begins to shed his dusky skin above us, shining in the glory of the night sky. The yellow faces fade into the desert ground, the scent the only reminder of what lies beneath the dark. We had what we came for, bottled up in our cells of remembrance, gone again on midnight’s coat tails.