Category Flowers/Gardening
Chicago – Flowers and fish (and tiny little dinosaurs)
Saturday morning dawned clear and beautiful. What better way to enjoy a perfect spring day in Chicago than by visiting a flower show at the Lincoln Park Conservatory? Their spring gardens were exquisite with their foxgloves and lilies . . . and astilbe, geraniums, daffodils and hydrangea. The orchid room was a valiant attempt but […]
Denver – Sweet familiarity
Welp, I made it to Denver. The trip went fine — but talk about over the river and through the woods! At 6:45am we were still sitting in the New York conference room negotiating, and I was starting to despair of catching the 8:00am train back to DC. But then the partner leaned over and […]
Bouquet
There’s nothing like fresh-cut flowers to make getting ready in the morning a joy. My favorites are star-gazer lilies — it’s basically impossible to have too many! With star-gazers in the bathroom, my whole apartmentsmells like a florist’s shop.
Elijah Fish
Remember these guys? Rainbow, Goldie and Ralph (so named by my nieces and nephew in Boise) have been my faithful companions these six months. Being the talented goldfish they are, they have performed their piscine duties of being pretty and not dying with remarkable diligence — even when I abandoned them to the negligent care of […]
Jasmine
Adding to my success with late-summer blooms, I’m delighted to see that my jasmine plant has blossomed again. The plant had blossomed once earlier in the summer, but I was in Morocco and so was unable to enjoy the flowers and their scent. I was afraid I’d missed my chance — but no! There are a handful of buds […]
Labor Day
Labor Day is one of the better holidays for visiting DC — you get the benefit of a holiday (no commuter traffic, parking regulations aren’t enforced) but it’s late enough in the year that the masses of tourists are gone (yay!). This means we had the place essentially to ourselves. Capitol TourWe started with a tour […]
Life in the margins (plus, a shower curtain)
Oh man. It’s been one of those months. Way too much work, unrealistic deadlines, unpleasant clients — all of my time is still not enough. Even if I’d been willing to pull all-nighters, the clients and partners would still have wanted more. So, of course, my personal life has been pushed yet again to the margins. Family, […]
Water Hyacinth
I looked out the window, and what did I see? A sprig of purple flowers emerging from my water hyacinth! I’m so pleased. Everyone I spoke to (and all the books I read) while preparing this summer’s water garden cautioned me about buying flowering plants: Apparently they need something like a gazillion hours of direct sunlight before […]
Granada – The Alhambra
The Alhambra is a fortress-palace complex that dates from the 9th century, with the principal buildings and gardens having been built in the 13th and 14th centuries by the Nasrid emirs. After the Christians conquered the region, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who funded Columbus) added a large Renaissance palace to the site as well. Amanda and […]
Marrakesh, Day 2: Le Jardin Majorelle
Jacques Majorelle was a French-born landscape painter during the first half of the Twentieth Century. He settled in Marrakesh in 1917 and, from the 1930s until his death in the early 1960s, developed a fabulous walled garden around his villa, with plants from all around the globe. After Majorelle died, the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent […]
A More Gentlemanlike Manner 