Roadrunner (and clouds)

We have a roadrunner!  yes, it's the state bird of New Mexico, but I've very rarely seen one in Eldorado - and this was straight outside the front door, when I was looking for - once again - the plumbers (who I think replaced the errant part of one of the toilets this time ...).  And when it saw me - off it emphatically ran.  It looks a bit like a dull-colored anorexic pheasant, with its long long tail.

And here, in case you were wondering, are Today's Clouds.

 

smoky sky

Rather a lot of sky this week, but it's been worth looking at ... This is smoke from the Indios fire (started by lightning), which is about 50 miles away, but drifting towards here in large bands (it is, though, 25% contained, and there is, thankfully, no wind).  It made for an unusual evening walk - once I could tear myself away from the TV and the commentary and analysis of the Trump verdict.  It was quite wonderful that the justice system worked - despite the fact that surely he's about to make some vile capital out of it.

 

the uncertainty of clouds

All day, the sky has been threatening something, but nothing damp has materialized - though as I was driving back from dinner out this evening, there was lightning flickering around in all directions.  I'm tempted to draw some kind of analogy with the fact that the Dean of our College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has resigned (to take up a spiffy new job as head of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), giving us all precisely two weeks and two days notice.  I'm assuming that she'd given a heads up to the Higher Administration that this was in the offing - but who knows - or rather, who knows what's next?  No wonder the bottom photo has an apocalyptic air to it.

 

Santa Fe Botanical Gardens

The water main is mended!  There is water in the house!  I was so exhausted by this excitement that reading/writing were lurching along in a very subdued way by early afternoon, so I took myself off somewhere that (to my quiet shame) I've never been: the Santa Fe Botanical Garden.  Truly, it was so peaceful that I could very well have brought my work here and probably have been productive.

I was impressed by its real care for the local plants and environment (who knew that there were so many different kinds of penstemon?) and, most certainly, its care for bees.  Incidentally, the bees are very busy today out back at the locust tree blossoms (the allergic effects of which have pretty well succeeded in shutting up my eyes) - their wings beating at 200 beats per second, and emitting their buzz in C.

Here on Museum Hill, they have their own bee baths (I'm sure birds can use them too) with reminders to put stones in them for bees to rest on.

Then the Botanical Gardens, as well as being universally English-Spanish bilingual, give full weight both to Hispanic and to Native cultures, and traditional uses for local plants.

There's a little amphitheatre for presentations of various kinds - there was a docents' training, or such like, in full swing - and then a gateway out onto a small juniper and piñon loop.  It was successfully restorative.

 

working outside

Indeed, it's been a very satisfying quiet day (despite having no water), working outside on a sunny day.  Sunny, that is, apart from the layer of smoke that was settled over the hills when I went out first thing this morning, from a fire about 60 miles to the north.  Everything smelt smoky, too (and no, that wasn't the Memorial Day BBQ next door - and since one of them is a firefighter, I'd expect he'd know what to do if the burgers were getting too charred).

So here's the question: was it the smoke making my eyes dry and smarting, or was it the blossom on the locust tree? (I seem to remember that I've been susceptible to that before).  And also - I guess this is question #2 - where were all the bees?  The tree is usually thick with them at this time of year, but I only heard a few buzzing around. Since I was reading about bees - at least some of the time - this seemed to me rather an urgent question.

 

from the back garden

OK - it's not as spectacular as those railroad tracks, but it's still pretty good to have out of one's back door.  And it's great to have NM peace and quiet (I have a full work/writing week ahead) - even if I don't, as yet, have any water that doesn't come in large plastic containers.  And what did I do with the first one of these, after I brought it inside from the car?  Why, fill the birdbath, of course. 

 

sunset train

I can't decide if I prefer the tall or the horizontal shot - either way, tonight's sunset, looking up the tracks in Winslow Arizona, was pretty spectacular.  I think the vertical one, because of the hint of mountain in the distance... Either way, this view won out over some of the sites I saw on the way here, including a small flock of goats being chivvied back into their trailer after they'd paused at a Rest Area for water and some food.  They looked as though they would have preferred staying to roam around the Mojave Desert.

It's back to face the next installment of water and plumbing issues ...

 

lounging about

All I can say is ... it's all right for some.  Without anything especially out of the ordinary (other than some dental woes, though if you know me well, that counts as ordinary) ... but I should try and take a lesson in relaxation from young Mr Gramsci here.

 

under the heat lamps

Springtime in Los Angeles ... is grey and chilly, this year.  We headed out for a bowl of pasta (each) and some arugula salad at Little Dom's, a reliable been-there-for-ever local Italian eatery, and were very glad indeed that they had their outdoor heaters on.  My cocktail, on the right? I'm not quite sure what it had in it, other than mezcal and lime and aperol and smoked salt, but it was very good.

 

jacaranda and carpark

At last, the jacaranda trees are starting to come out all over LA, including on campus - where they are starting to take down some of the many, many fortifications, but where, nonetheless, it still feels like a very suspicious and inhospitable environment.  But the jacarandas endure ... I have no idea why they're so late this year: might it be the wet spring?  Or maybe, down at SC, they were just in solidarity against the administration, refusing to allow them the satisfaction of blooming at a time that coincided with the mutilated version of commencement.

 

The roses of Shannon Road

Not ours, alas - but down the street, and putting on their annual spectacular show.  The very wet first few months of the year have ensured that roses are looking wonderful this year (and that does include our two) ...

 

the geometry of fallen kumquats

Back to walking round the neighborhood - and to noting the small changes, like these stray kumquats.  You'd have thought that the raccoons would have snuffled these up by now, with great relish, but no.  Speaking of wildlife, we may have a mountain lion in Griffith Park again ...right over the other side, though.  All that we spotted on our walks today was a very nonchalant coyote, who strolled off into GP and curled up on what I always think of as Coyote Hill.

 

leafiness at both ends

This morning, the Natural HIstory Museum, in London - past which I trundled by bag en route to South Ken Tube Station; and then the view from our deck this evening - very good to return to a glass of wine out there.  At the NHM, they're currently creating a huge Sustainability Garden, which, it's to be hoped, will inspire thousands and thousands to think about what's actually possible in urban conditions.

It's been a long day...

 

A London Saturday

Given how often I go to the V&A, it's shocking how rarely I seem to go on the long walk to see the nineteenth century paintings ... passing, en route, Gilbert Scott's Hereford Screen (of which this is only a tiny bit of one pillar), and - goodness knows who, seen from above.

But I was exceptionally delighted to encounter a domestic snail, in Landseer's There's No Place Like Home (1842) (what's the message?  Come home SOON because I'm out of food and even the snail can't find any meaty fragments?)

and to find not just a dandelion, but a whole bouquet of biodiverse wildflowers in a cornfield in Richard Burchett's View Across Sandown Bay, Isle of White (c. 1863).

Then, among the excellent Turners, I noted quite how thick the white is on the buildings in his Venice from the Giudecca (1840) - as though he's adding to the mouldings.

Of course I paid a visit to the Beasts - these were the two who at one time stood outside our front door, when we lived in Cumberland.

And then Family - at least those who weren't stuck somewhere in Sussex/Surrey in an overheated car, or who were in Marrakesh, or for that matter New Zealand - so good to see them!

Finally a long walk through Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park - again, such a long time since I've looked at the Statue of Queen Victoria outside Kensington Palace that I'd forgotten that she has a little moat round her - if, indeed, I'd ever noticed ...

 

The Hive, Mark Quinn, and a whole lot of other bits of Kew

Today was the day when the final chapter/conclusion of my book changed dramatically.  It had been going to put fireflies and glowworms at the center - but I published a piece on them last year, and I wasn't particularly excited about going back to this material: I felt I'd said what I wanted to say.  I'd always shied away from writing about bees, because are they really "overlooked"?  Everyone loves bees (except when they sting them ...), surely?  But Wolfgang Buttress's Hive is extraordinary.  To enter into it is to become a bee, in that one's inside a hive - the small world being made huge, oneself diminished to the size of a worker bee (cue for all those Victorian parables about social organization), and one's in the middle of sound - music that is performed (like the thousand of LED lights inside the hive that glow on and off) in time with the vibrations of the garden's bees (in the key of C-   Who knew that bees buzzed in C-?).   It really does ... an accelerometer (a vibration sensor) sits inside a beehive at Kew, and it picks up the bees' vibrations in real time, and sends them off to the installation: these trigger the lights. And they also trigger noise gates at particular thresholds, and that sets off sounds from a pre-recorded library created by musicians improvising to a feed of live bee sounds.

It sits on a small hillock, like a medieval tower on a tor; and it's surrounded by a wildflower meadow (given that it's No Mow May, it doesn't look that different from lots of front lawns ...).

And one can walk round it - it's 17 metres high (that's 55.77 feet),

or stand at the bottom and look up to the sky - or at people lying on their backs, immersed, on the middle floor.

It's also reminiscent of other cathedral-like structure that one can stand inside at Kew, from Weeping Beeches

to the eighteenth-century Ice Cave, with its amazing brickwork.  I felt a rush of things to say coming on - and went off and scribbled a lot of notes while eating lunch from the incredibly sustainability-conscious Orangery cafeteria - including, would you believe, a Waste Knot rescue vegetable tart.

And there's also the Mark Quinn temporary installations scattered around.  I can't say I've ever been a fan of his work - I particularly loathed the stuff at the 2013 Venice Biennale (remember that huge white inflatable figure called "Breath" on the island of San Georgio Maggiore, anyone?) - but these sculptures had a certain pull.  But the thinking is so obvious.  When we look at nature - we get ourselves reflected back to us! (that's so much not what I think, but I understand what he means, of course, and how that's reinforced by what happens when we take photographts of his shiny surfaces).

I did, though, quite like the ones buried deep in the foliage of the Temperate House (though not his huge Bonsai sculptures);

and there was an indoor show that featured work he's done in collaboration with the Herbarium, as well as some of his freeze dried pieces, and his reflections about how we - whether a plant cell or a human - all basically share the same DNA.

And, it being the middle of May, the rest of Kew was looking pretty spectacular, too - the roses, of course, but really everything else.

  I spent some time in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, which I haven't visited for an age: the pics below are from there ...