Open the Doors to Petal Power

I got to only a few of the stops of Grimsby Open Doors Day on Saturday.  I definitely made it to Van Geest Greenhouses - growers of Gerber flowers for the floral trade. They are located close to the Museum on the western side of town.  I can imagine it would have been farmer fields when they built the greenhouses on Kerman Avenue. The greenhouse dates back to 1890.   This would make it less efficient than today's high-technology operations.  In talking with one of the owners, I found out that their second location is on Seventh Avenue in St. Catharines in a modern facility. That's very close to Brian's Lilycrest Gardens hybridizing field.  It is located on Fifth Avenue. This pretty picture is not the scene that awaited us for Open Doors Grimsby.  I realized it was the setting for a Petals and Plates dinner.  This is an initiative of Flowers Ontario and the Toronto Botanical Gardens.  Gourmet meals from the chef at Grand Oaks were served in 2 greenhouses in Niagara and a third location near Guelph in 2018.  I hope this is something to look forward to in 2019.   You can see that Gerberas are great big daisy flowers - they popular in florist bouquets.  They are showy, long-lasting and come it a lot of colours. In the greenhouse, the plants live about 2 years in pots and continuously bloom.  They are fussy, though, and take a lot of skill to grow. I learned  this when I planted some Gerberas in the garden this year.  I wanted a continuous line of red along the front of the garden bed.  In the shade were Begonias, but they burn in the sun, so I put in Gerberas to keep that line moving.  I knew from last year that they needed a lot of water.  I had them in pots on the outside kitchen windowsill.  Even in the garden I found they needed watering every day.  They wilted quickly whenever water was needed.  And they wanted a lot of fertilizer to ensure a continuous bloom of red flowers. For my colour line next year, I am counting on the red annual Salvia as a good choice. It comes in a brilliant orange-red and is continuously blooming.  That's if I stay with the orange red colour line.

A Truth Table Day

I find out that Einstein created a series of riddles.  What is interesting is that in Einstein's time he considered only 2% would solve the riddle below.  In our time the creation of a logic grid (like a truth table) to manage boolean logic is common. Basic boolean logic dominated computer and information management disciplines by the 1970's.  Computer spreadsheets in the 1980's made possible the analysis and display of row and column data. It made complicated oral descriptions simple.  In fact, it seems to me that we completed the move from the oral tradition to the visual tradition with computer spreadsheets.   The Einstein riddle comes from brainden.com.  "It is said that this quiz was made up by the famous physicist and according to him 98% will not solve it. There is a row of five different color houses. Each house is occupied by a man of different nationality. Each man has a different pet, prefers a different drink, and smokes different brand of cigarettes. The Brit lives in the Red house. The Swede keeps dogs as pets. The Dane drinks tea. The Green house is next to the White house, on the left. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill. The man living in the centre house drinks milk. The Norwegian lives in the first house. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer. The German smokes Prince. The Norwegian lives next to the Blue house. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water. Who has fish at home? Are you one of the 2%? Further Discussion" Let's complete our 'truth table' with its metadata row along the top:  Occupant nationality, House colour, Cigarette brand, Drink type, Pet type. Our garden pictures today come from the Denver Botanical Garden, so I guess our first picture would be titled Botanical Bunny.

A Note from Einstein

It was JazzFM that brought this story to my attention - a note written on a Tokyo hotel official paper in 1922 by Albert Einstein sold at an auction in Jerusalem, October 24, 2017 for $1.5 million. The headline of this interesting story:  Einstein's Note on Happiness Sells for... "While in Japan, Einstein stayed at Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. During his stay, a hotel worker came to Einstein’s room to make a delivery. Einstein found himself without any money to give the man as a tip for his services. So, instead of money, the famous scientist handed the hotel worker a signed note with a sentence he wrote in German. It read: “A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it.” He gave him another note that read: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” He advised the bellboy to keep these notes as they would become more valuable than a tip.  We look at two elements in the garden today - a birch tree creatively displays bird houses in a Grimsby garden and bamboo leaves seen through the conservatory plexiglass window at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Surfacing Attention

Surfaces and Textures are an interesting theme for photography.  There are so many kinds of surface structures, details, shapes, and textures as the subject of the image. The photographer's task is to showcase the surface and texture itself.   There are so many places to find these - everywhere - in the grain patterns of wood, the surface of stones, crystals of snow and ice, water, fabric, metal, leaves, sand, woven objects, clouds.  Included are urban decay surfaces such as rust and decay where scratches and dents create surface structure, texture, detail, and colour. Textures can occur at all level – including aerial photography and landscape views. The types of surfaces and textures include: rough, ragged, gritty, bumpy, spiky, sharp, fuzzy, slimy, slick, slippery, smooth, soft, silky, scaly, coarse, burl, knot, slub, abrasive, scratchy, shaggy, bristly, prickly, spiny, thorny, burnished, glossy, polished, powdery, and fine grain. So I went to two of my own portfolios to see what was there - Surfacing Attention and Nature's Impressions - and clipped the thumbnail image displays.  We see the array of surfaces and textures all around us.

Blossoming!

The news last week said that the asteroid that is coming 1.1 million miles distance from Earth is 'a reminder that somewhere out there an asteroid may have our name on it'.  It made me think of silly expressions, such as: "Don't worry if plan A fails, there are 25 more letters in the alphabet." We have arrived at Spring in Niagara.  We had warm weather on Sunday and Monday and the earliest blossoms opened.  Grapes, on the other hand, open with the lengthening days, so won't bloom for a few weeks yet. Our first picture of the blossom trail is shows migrant workers pruning the orchards.  "Migrant Dreams" is a documentary that profiles their plight - wages lower than our minimum wage, lack of health care, and living conditions that can be unsafe.  The circumstances are described in this article. I became aware of this because of the tireless work by Michael Hahn for the migrant workers.  Centred in Beamsville, he started out providing bicycles for transportation and now has expanded to clothing, a doctor's clinic, and other services they have difficulty accessing. A few weeks ago, I was part of the Grimsby Rotary Club's dinner for Niagara area migrants.  They come to Mike Hahn's home base - St. Albans church - on Sunday each week for a church service in Spanish, to visit the doctor in the one-room clinic, and to have a home-cooked meal.  It is very rewarding to be of service for an evening.  It goes a step towards awareness of the issues.  So now everywhere I go, I am so aware of our migrant workers and how many there are. our last two pictures show the row of corkscrew willows in spring sunshine vs fog - what a great demonstration of light creating emotion and story.

Another Hour

Another hour before Spring is here at 6:29am.   Poets have given us beautiful Spring verses for as long as there have been poets.  So let us revel in its first moments. In Spring, everything is full of promise.... The child sporting upon the lawn, and the season, sympathize together, and nature rejoices in her virgin loveliness. ~Charles Lanman, "The Dying Year," 1840 It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. ~Charles Dickens, Great Expectations It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! ~Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Detective The year’s at the spring And day’s at the morn; Morning’s at seven; The hillside’s dew-pearled; The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn; God’s in His heaven - All’s right with the world! ~Robert Browning It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o’er the green corn-field did pass, In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring. (As You Like It, 5.3.15-20 Our Grimsby Garden Club members planted the town's hanging baskets yesterday at Trillium Hill Greenhouses, located at the west end of Grimsby.  This year, the group celebrated the event with a Lilitopia moment.

Lifehacker Thursday

The Cannas have finished blooming for the year, and the tubers are tucked away till next spring.  The leaves are a significant size.  That  means light in combination with the lines on the leaves make for wonderful abstracts. And I found this with the news today: There's a Top 10 website called Lifehacker.  In April, it celebrated its 10th anniversary and posted its most popular top ten lists of everything.  Take a look HERE.  With the website's success, Thursdays are known as "Lifehack Thursday".

Look Down and See the Abstracts

Look Down What do you see in Asphalt?  Do you see a parking place that you are not allowed to park in or has preference for someone else? This is a lucky find in Burlington.  It is a 'family parking' spot with the usual pink and orange/yellow and the white stroller.  This one is layered with a previous life as a wheelchair space and has blue is showing through. Asphalt is like mosaic with its textured pieces fitting together.  There's a lot of room to create abstracts. I found these files yesterday on a camera memory disk that is corrupted so it was run through a recovery program.

Soon the Last Leaf

There still are leaves on some of the trees.  The oaks hold their leaves much longer, as do the Japanese Maples.  Here's a pair of lingering leaves from last week:

Trout Lily Spring

We are lucky in Niagara to have maple forests.  Where there are maple forests there are trilliums - sometimes they carpet a mature wood.  So many beautiful little ephemerals bloom in spring and then disappear until the next year.  

This is one of the early spring bloomers - Trout Lily.  It is Erythronium americanum.  It's also known as Dogtooth Violet and Yellow Adder's Tongue.  It is in the Liliaceae family.  I didn't realize that it is an edible plant.  At the same time, it seems to be an emetic (makes you throw up), so it is not recommended that one eat a lot of it.  I guess I wouldn't add this one to the menu with guests coming.