Tag Archives: Missouri Botanical Gardens

Palaver

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Cymbidium Valley Blush - Magnificent

I nearly had an accident this morning. I was headed northbound on 170 and had almost reached my exit, when this incident occurred. Instead of my usual NPR diatribe, I was listening to a podcast, off of the iPhone. The podcast was of an etymological bent, so I was rather self-absorbed by it when danger arose. A piece of metal was stretched perfectly perpendicular across my lane. Even in retrospect, I can only describe it as one of those spike strips that the police use to disable high-speed chase vehicles. Rousing from my stupor, I managed to get two wheels around it, but the other two wheels were forced to plow over it. It made a hell of a racket. I exited a half mile later and there was a police station right there. I found no damage to the car. I reported the obstacle to the desk sergeant, who turned to the dispatcher, who confirmed that it had been removed. Just not in time for me. On the return run, in the evening, the radio traffic report had a box spring bed and a car hood on different highways about town. There was a lot of littering going on today. Recounting all of this to Anne at dinner, she told me about her own road obstacle incident, from many years ago. Stuffed animals littered the road in front of her. She steeled her heart and did not try to serve around them; the traffic would not have permitted it anyway. Afterwards, she consoled herself with the knowledge that these were all factory fresh stuffed animals, so none had yet been loved.

The Waking Dead

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Pink Halo with Blue Vase

Like Dan’s artwork, “A Train Departs the City Traveling 55 mph”, which is a rough transcription of an object someone else dreamt he made; this post is also based upon someone else’s dream. This dream was relayed to me before my trip to New Mexico. At the time, I took some notes. Today, I attempted to clarify some questions that I had about those notes, but the dreamer no longer had any recollection of the dream. From this point on, the reader would be safe to assume that the remainder of this post is just fiction.

I awoke from sleep; or rather I was awoken from sleep. You know how sometimes you wakeup because other people choose to break the morning’s silence? Not related to this dream, last Friday, while still sleep deprived, I was awakened by my neighbor and his rented backhoe. I was trying to transition from my nocturnal schedule to my usual diurnal one. I had slept the night through and had plans to sleep most of the day when the roar of a neighbor’s construction equipment awoke me. My crash/cram recovery course then foiled, it has taken me even to today, to gain even some measure of recovery, in the mean time.

Anyway, back to the dream, I was awoken by a commotion. A cleaning lady was in my bedroom, and she was dumping all my clothes into a pile in the center of the room. I got out of bed, avoiding her and noticed a second cleaning lady asleep on the living room couch. The first cleaning lady noticed me and said, “She’s been working too hard. It’s my turn to do the work.” Moving next to the bathroom, I noticed that the sink was full of dirt, like someone had dumped a wheelbarrow into it. A new racket attracted my attention. A pair of contractors, one in the dining room, one in the opposite computer room, were using sledgehammers to make holes in the intervening wall, a load bearing wall I might add. They were making a heck of a mess. A still greater din was coming from out in front of the house. The street was being torn up. Children, elementary school kids, were tearing up the street, with shovels and pickaxes. They were being directed by their teachers. Finally, a strange man came out of the bedroom that I had just left. He had a pocket watch in his hand. He said that he was taking it as payment for a drug deal that had gone bad.

This dream occurred before the New Mexico trip. It has foretold nothing, while I was gone. When I returned, the house was still standing, the street was intact, there was a pile of clothes on the bedroom floor, but this shambling mound was there before I left and even before the dream occurred. We are planning some home improvement, so it may yet become a foretelling of things to come. 

Who Wrote the Book of Love?

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Valentine’s Day is just a few days away, and I’m all over it this year. I have already knocked down steps one and two on the guy’s big list of things to do for V-Day. With this kind of momentum going, I ought to be able to cruise into this national holiday that is dedicated to romance, feeling proud, with my head held high. Tuesday night, there will be no last-minute stops at the grocery store for me. Lesser men may be found in the candy aisle then, but not me, not this year anyway.

Orchid Show

Step one is flowers, every girl loves flowers, and where are the best flowers in town found? Why at the botanical gardens of course. I took Anne to the Orchid Show on Saturday. The photos with this post are from there. I can hear the other hens begin to cluck, “Cheap, cheap, cheap”, but hear me out. Last year, I went the grocery store route. I haven’t always been this debonair. I bought her an orchid plant then. It looked nice when I brought it home, but over time, it deteriorated. This time around, even Anne didn’t want to go that route again. The flowers at the show were gorgeous. We both took lots of pretty pictures of them, pictures that won’t deteriorate. So, I can check off step one.

Paphiopedilum Lathamianum

Step two is a romantic dinner for two. Some prefer the hustle and bustle of Valentine’s Day night, but I find it to be too hectic then, besides Valentine’s Day falls on a week day this year. You are always better off scheduling the dinner before Valentine’s Day than after. After just seems like an afterthought. Saturday night, last night, worked out just fine. Now about the choice of the restaurant, this is an important decision, and is best not left to the last-minute. For me though this decision was easy, because I didn’t have to make it. Kubie had already made it for me. A couple of weeks ago, at the bike swap meet, she had scolded me for not taking Anne out to dinner to celebrate the 2112 miles that Anne had bicycled last year. With both Valentine’s Day and bike mileage to celebrate, the restaurant had to be good. Voila, Tony’s was the only choice! Tony’s is the best restaurant in town; it is where Team Kaldi’s friends held the inaugural mileage celebration dinner and it is where I proposed to Anne and she accepted. So, it was simple, see?

The service was impeccable; they even fetched the car, when I couldn’t locate the valet parking. The owner, Vince Bommarito, stopped by our table and chatted us up for a few minutes. The food was great too. We started with salads. I had the Tony’s salad, and Anne had the Tomato salad, with Gorgonzola, and Balsamic dressing. For entries, Anne ordered Tilefish from off the menu, and yes it is endangered. I had Tony’s signature Lobster Albanello. Finally, for dessert, Anne had a Lemon Ricotta Cheese Torte, with Strawberry Sauce, while I had the best Crème Brulee in town. Eat your heart out Danny, but at only eight bucks, it was also the best deal of the night.

Target Acquired

And what about step three you ask? Sorry guys, but I can’t give away all of my techniques. That just wouldn’t be right. Don’t worry though; come Tuesday night, there will be lots of other guys at the grocery store willing to share their great ideas with you. Thanks Sam for the steer to the Theodolite App. It will help me to acquire the target of my affections.

Feathers, Petals and Fur

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This post is both reprise and counterpoint to yesterday’s post. This post shows you all of the pictures that I got all high and mighty about not showing you yesterday. Returning to the scene of the crime, I offer up feathers, in the form of the Silver-Beaked Tanager, the petals of an African Daisy and a mouse in the Climatron’s house. The Clerodendrum photo segues to the City Diner’s chandelier.

After yesterday’s MoBot sojourn, Anne and I hightailed it over to the City Diner on South Grand. We snagged a primo table, in the back, a booth, with side-by-side seating. This gave us the equivalent to stadium seating to the Sunday morning brunch bowl. There were three tables of note. Tables one and two featured two gentlemen each. Each table had one talker and one listener. The third table featured a young couple. Here the man seemed the most animated, the woman looked tired. Leaping to conclusions I assumed that her fatigue was due to too much fun in bed. You know what they say when you assume something? This was silly of me. When the man got up to go to the bathroom, he revealed the newborn-carrier that had been hidden on his side of the booth. Her fatigue was explained. He came back with a baby bottle. Our meal arrived. Afterwards, my attention returned to the two tables of two men. What if I were to mix them up? What would happen if I put the two listeners together and the two talkers together? Would it cause an explosion? Fortunately, the check came before I had time to find out.

Politics is the conjunction of two words. The first syllable Poli- comes from the Greek word Poly, which means many and the second syllable -tics comes from the blood-sucking parasite. So, logically the business of politics must also be the business of many blood-sucking parasites. This is how I view this year’s political landscape from my lofty eyrie, perched in front of my keyboard. I stare out over the blogosphere and study the nuances of the political winds, until I become so bleary eyed that I cannot see the screen for the pixels. I feel like ancient Diogenes, perpetually searching for just one honest politician.

This week I found one and then lost this honest politician all in one short speech. I’m speaking of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Gabby in a short video, announced her resignation from Congress. She announced it now, to give other candidates time to campaign. She waited a year to announce it, to give herself time to heal. After a year, she decided that she would need more time and that the demands of the job ran counter to her needs. She may return to politics someday. She certainly hasn’t ruled it out and the remarkable level of recovery that she has already obtained, trumpets this belief. I’ll relight Diogenes’ lantern, as portent of her eventual return.

No Feathers, No Petals, No Fur

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Nature photography contests sometimes restrict entries by excluding pictures of birds, flowers and mammals. This is done, because most nature photography usually features one or more of these elements and if you’ve run more than a few of these contests, you have likely gotten tired of these three themes. In this post’s slideshow, I have done the same. This morning, Anne and I drove over to the Missouri Botanical Gardens (MoBot). The weather was foggy, misty and grey this morning. The garden’s grounds are mostly in hibernation this month, but with this unusually mild winter, there is already some signs of spring. We quickly decided to bail from the dull, bland exterior and entered the Climatron.

The Climatron is MoBot’s signature structure. A geodesic dome, it was built-in 1960, to replace the crumbling Palm House, which had housed the garden’s palm and cycad collection since 1914. In 1988 the Climatron was renovated. The two greenhouses, the Desert House and the Mediterranean House, that had bookended it until then were torn down. A new Temperate House was erected and this is where we chose to enter the Climatron from. The Temperate House is almost as warm as the Climatron, but nowhere near as humid. The time spent in the Temperate House helped, as did using an electric hand-drier, but my camera still chose to fog up for the first few minutes in the dome. We spent the next hour in this tropical paradise, far away from the winter blahs.

Adhering to the no feathers, petals and fur protocol, one tends to dwell upon a meditation in texture. Fortunately, nature has texture in abundance. In case you were wondering, Anne assures me that the pictured cycad does not include a flower. Evolutionarily, the cycad predates the development of the flower. Photo expeditions like today’s make for great blog fodder. Between the two of us, Anne and I took about 300 pictures, of which you might see 10%. Pictures are nice, but a blog requires writing too. Hence this meditation on textuality, today’s post.

Deer Creek

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Christmas Trees Repurposed as Fish Habitat

Sometimes you have to dig deep within yourself to come up with a blog post, but on other times, it just bubbles to the surface. Last week we received an email from the Deer Creek Watershed Alliance (DCWA), a project of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It explained the progress made on the ratification of the Deer Creek watershed management plan and something dearer to my heart, lots of maps.

Studying these maps, it turns out that the open storm sewer that flows through the neighborhood actually has a name, Claytonia Creek. One of the activities of the DCWA is naming all of these once nameless storm sewers within the watershed. The idea is that people might care more about Claytonia Creek than some nameless storm sewer.

One of the maps shows that our storm sewers are combined with the sanitary sewers. This is a product of the history of our subdivision. Our house was built-in the 1930s, so the streets and the sewers must have been laid out then or earlier. That’s the way they built back then. This means that the metropolitan sewer district must treat both our sewer water and our rain runoff. Most of the city of Saint Louis is like this too, heavy rains, result in sewage spills.

Anne and Joanie drove up north to the Riverlands, along the Mississippi, today, to look for eagles. They saw Bald Eagles, Trumpeter Swans, Canada Geese, Mallards, Golden Eyes, seagulls, a Great Blue Heron and a Kestral. I elected to bicycle in the park instead. I got 15 miles. I took the picture with this post. It shows Christmas trees that have been repurposed as fish habitat in Jefferson Lake. The park is outside the Deer Creek watershed. It is part of the River Des Peres watershed, which Deer Creek is a tributary of. For those of you planning to paddle to the sea, the route runs Deer Creek, River Des Peres, the Mississippi, to the sea.

Year End Post

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Japanese Garden Bridge

The photo with this post is of a bridge. It is symbolic of the journey we take tonight, from one year to the next. It is a crooked bridge, for a crooked path. It is a path more across time than space. So, goodbye 2011 and hello, 2012! We’ll see you all on the other side. Alright, enough of this metaphysical mumbo jumbo, let’s get back to the real world. Let’s go to where the rubber meets the road, the bike tire rubber that is.

Anne and I launched towards the park, but our goal was Lafayette Park and Park Avenue Coffee. Our mission was to deliver a Christmas present to Kubie. Anne had knitted her a hat. We got there early and had pumpkin spiced lattes to while away the time. Mission accomplished, we headed for home. Have I left anything out? Oh yeah, there was our little run-in with the law.

This being New Year’s Eve the SLPD and likely all law enforcement agencies are on heightened alert. On our out-bound leg we were not, but we should have been. We were cruising east on Clayton Avenue, passing by the Barnes Hospital complex, which is always a ghost town on a Saturday. We came upon a stop sign, looked around, but didn’t see anyone. So, we did what we always do, we made a Saint Louis stop and just rolled right through it without actually stopping. We should have checked six, because right behind us was a SLPD patrol car. He chirped his siren, rolled down his rear window and as he moved on, let his canine partner chew us out. Whoop! Woof! Woof! Don’t let the dogs out! Whoop! Woof! Woof! Who let the dogs out? So if you are going out tonight, drive carefully.

We rode 27 miles today, which is longer than we normally ride, and is also counterintuitive to our expected goal of staying up to midnight tonight. The reason for this exercise was to give Anne 2150 miles for the year. And me? In short, I don’t know. At the beginning of the year, I made the zen-like decision not to record my miles for the year. This is the first time for that in seventeen years. Anne thinks that she has more miles than I and she may be right, I just don’t know. If she is right, then this would be the first time for that in seventeen years too. As a new years resolution, I promise to record my miles next year. This ought to keep those of my bike buddies happy. I’m speaking of the sub-genre know as the mileage weenies. Happy New Year all!