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.