July 16 2023 - Lily Show Weekend

 

It was the Ontario Lily Show yesterday at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington.  RBG is again under renewal.  I can’t help but contrast the funding in the U.S. and in Canada.  I expect that it isn’t that the US receives more government funding. It is that there are more super-rich people there who support and fund their favourite institutions.  Brian was recently in Chicago and commented that the Chicago Botanical Gardens were large and  perfect with immaculate maintenance.   That’s not the case with RBG.  It isn’t that I want immaculate gardens, but when gardens are presented as ornamental display gardens, then they end up with the expectations of an ornamental garden. That means weeding and caretaking that matches with this ornamentalist approach.  It is like having a lawn and then maintaining it poorly - not mowing it regularly and having major weed infestations.   With that, there still is great delight in the Royal Botanical Gardens displays.  The lily ponds are beautiful and the rose garden is a showplace.  Its renovation a few years ago make it more inclusive of all kinds of plants and has been very successful.  The Lily Show has decilned in numbers of lilies each year.  Members are growing older, the lily beetle has diminished interest in growing and showing lilies, and competitive flower shows have dwindled in numbers and interest. - young people have other inclinations.   It still remains a wonderful show and in particular, the floral arrangements are creative and beautiful.

Isn’t the black water of the RBG lily pond so amazing!    Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

June 9 2022 - Dr. Biden

 

Which spouse of a head of state has a doctoral degree?  Would it be Boris Johnson's Carrie Symonds, Doug Ford's Karla Ford, Melania Trump or Jill Biden?  It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure it out.  Dr. Jill Biden has a bachelor's degree in English, a master's degree in English and Education,  and a doctoral degree in Education.  She has founded many charity organizations and is an advocate for education opportunities.  She's published a memoir and two children's books. She has a lengthy entry of accomplishments in her Wikipedia entry.  Karla Ford is Doug Ford's wife who bio entries say things like: "She is not much active in politics, but her husband is. Her husband Doug Ford has won the premier election again. Has become the Premier of Ontario again."   Unlike Jill Biden, Karla Ford doesn't have her own wikipedia entry.  The various biographies of her cover her height, weight, net worth, age, kids and so on.  All of them cover her children because of their names - Karla's daughters are named Krista, Kayla, Kara and Kyla. Pictures of Karla show her in body-building poses.  There are pictures of one of her daughters in body-building poses - lots of muscles.  Melania Trump is another world altogether when it comes to a wikipedia entry. There's a very lengthy and complicated entry. It covers her modelling starting at 5 years of age.  The sexually explicit photos and nude photos are all listed.  It highlights her businesses with a jewelry and skin care line where the manufacturers terminated their relationship with her in 2017.  It notes that she and Donald Trump gained attention in 1999 when they gave a lewd interview with shock jock Howard Stern.  There are all kinds of gossipy stories about her in the entry.  It just goes on and on.   In comparison to Jill Biden's authorship, Melania Trump's authorship is challenged.  She was "promoted" to have written a pamphlet where she contributed a paragraph in the introduction. Accusations of plagiarism followed. I also wondered about Boris Johnson's wife.  He's been in the news so much lately with the COVID party scandals and boorish behaviour. She was a Conservative Party media official and senior advisor to the ocean conservation charity Oceana.  Her biography seems somewhere between Jill Biden's and Melania Trump's. She was a victim who testified against John Worboys who drugged and sexually assaulted women. In relation to Boris Johnson, the entry indicates she had an affair with Boris Johnson while he was married and then they married secretly.  Is there any through-line in the biographies of these wives? There is so much contrast today.  What trends would we see in political heads of state spouses if we did a full analysis? Maybe it is chaos.  What do you think? The roses are starting to bloom in my garden - this is the Royal Botanical Garden's rose display last year. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Feb 27 2022 - The Packing Cube

 

The US will be getting out there on vacation according to CNN. Their question is this:  Do you have your packing cube?  My question in return reveals how much I travel. What is a packing cube? Wikipedia says:  packing cubes allow for grouping items together in a variety of ways. Pack clothes for each day of the trip into separate cubes, or keep similar items together like tops in one cube and bottoms in another.  It is a series of small bags designed to organize clothes inside luggage and compress clothing to ensure optimum use of space.  Packing cubes came out in the 2000s.  Rick Steves' Europe has them for sale. His website says that tour buses are rolling on his many tours which are all named  "Best of ..."   And I guess we should get ready for the travel visitors - CNN outlines its list of the 10 best Canadian places to visit for a vacation during the "holidays."  I assume that means their spring break vacations given this article was written this month. Spring break in the US varies between the end of February through to April and is specific to colleges and universities. Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake are on their list with the other famous places such as Whistler, Lake Louise and Quebec City. Ottawa seems to be missing... Today's picture is another nice Spring view of the Royal Botanical Gardens in spring.

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Feb 26 2022 - Time to March

 

It is only a few days until March - the start of Meteorological Spring.  We get to celebrate two springs each year.   It is at this turning point - from February to March - that we experience big variations in climate - green grass and rain one day and snow flurries another.   Compare this to Vancouver and Victoria where the early cherry blossoms are in bloom.  Butchart Gardens calls February the Spring Prelude.  South of us in Delaware at Winterthur, millions of snow drops and early crocus are in bloom by mid-February.   So while I may be able to see the leaves of snow drops outside the office window in between the snow and rain, they won't be blooming for a number of weeks.   I can enjoy the photos of spring gardens past.  The pictures today are from the Royal Botanical Gardens before the renovation of the Rock Garden.   And here is a spring flower joke:  Roses are gray Violets are gray Tulips are gray Because I am a dog   I wonder if there are more dog jokes like this.

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June 26 2020 - Trudeau Vs Mulroney

Our two favourite political dynasties in Canada have been in the news on the topic of racism.  The most recent is Ben Mulroney.  He made the headlines apologizing for his wife Jessica over her much-publicized 'negative interaction' - a euphemism for 'racist interaction' with Sasha Exeter.   The lead line in one story reads: "Who needs the police force when the Laurentian elite can just abuse you directly?"  And then there's the name dropping - Megan Merkle's name - as she and Jessica were friends.  Jessica is quoted as "having deployed a classic defence: that she had a Black friend. As I told you privately, I have lived a very public and personal experience with my closest friend where race was front and centre,” she wrote in response to Ms. Exeter’s video, referring to Meghan Markle.   Markle has been reported to have 'cast her adrift'.  Editorials consider Ben Mulroney's involvement in his wife's problems to be a strategic one - to be about protecting the "Mulroney brand'.  I think that came from John Doyle of the Globe and Mail who recounted a situation where he was on the receiving end of Mulroney dynasty pressures and complaints related to coverage of Ben.  On the other side of the dynasty ring is Justin Trudeau.  Remember not so long ago - in September 2019 - he apologized for a picture showing him in blackface at a party in 2001.   He expressed "deep regret, declared that his privileged background left a blind spot to such racist acts and insisted he was no longer the man in the photo." That was just before the election, too. It's easier to see privilege and racism way up there.  Makes me nervous to think about Stephen Harper's children, now in their twenties, and what we could expect there.  And then there's the Ford family.   Seeing as there's no easy answer on this topic, let's go on to the image of the day.  What do you think of this water lily?  It seems to be on its side in the water. I would think the water lilies just got placed into the gardens at RBG as they were all lying at the top like this - in tangled messes.  They would have come from deeper water ponds, so their stems are too long.   I went about some photoshop hair-cutting and trimming, to form them into a very nice composition. Then it took some dyeing to make the water consistently black.  Sounds like a COVID-19 hair salon appointment.

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June 11 2020 - Why is Chlorophyll Green?

When I look out the window, I see a lot of green.  That's because there are a lot of plants. Why is chlorophyll green?   The answer:  green plants are green because they contain a pigment called chlorophyll.  Chlorophyll appears green to our eyes because most of the light it absorbs is blue and red, leaving behind the rest of the spectrum, which averages out to green. Why is the sky green before a tornado? One theory that 'holds water', so to speak, is that certain thunderheads filter wavelengths of light, leaving only green. Computer models verify the thickness of the cloud combined with the diameter of the water droplets can produce a green color. A powerful thunderstorm has the right size of clouds, optimal amount of water, and may produce a tornado. Why is water green? Green water lakes commonly have high concentrations of chlorophyll-containing algae which can give water a green color. Chlorophyll can be measured with sensors such as the YSI chlorophyll probe. Green lakes are often eutrophic and typically contain more harmful algal blooms than other types of lakes. Why are frogs green? Frogs are not green because they have green pigment in their skin. Instead, they use a complex arrangement of cells, a more complicated approach to be sure, but one that provides a tremendous potential for changing and adjusting their hue. In their skins they have three types of pigment cells (called chromatophores) stacked on top of each other. At the bottom are melanophores, containing a mostly dark pigment called melanin. These are the same cells that can make human skin various shades of brown. On top of the melanophores are iridophores, packed with highly reflective bundles of purine crystals, and on top of the iridophores are xanthophores, usually packed with yellowish pteridine pigments. In the typical green frog, light penetrates to the iridophores, which act like tiny mirrors to reflect mostly blue light back into the xanthophores above them. These cells act like yellow filters, so the light escaping the skin surface appears green to our eyes. Occasionally a frog is found that lacks the yellow xanthophore cells, and these are hard to miss because they are bright blue! Our first picture is the Houtby farm yesterday.  This is not a happy crop picture.  There's been a heat wave and the peonies are blooming.  This is a crop that is picked in bud, so these are a pretty show, but not a happy moment.   Our next picture is another view of the iris garden at RBG.

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June 10 2020 - How Many Flowers?

Irises come in every colour.  Yesterday's visit to the Laking garden at Royal Botanical Gardens was a tumultuous gathering of colours.  How many flowers were blooming?  There are over 1,000 types of irises in the collection.  There likely are least 20 stems on every planting.  Each stem has at least one flower in bloom.  So we were looking at something in the range of 20,000 flowers yesterday.  It is satisfying to see so many flowers. There are lots of theories on why humans love flowers.  One article says this: One clue is that flowers stimulate the same sensory apparatus that humans use for assessing the quality of fruits. Fruits often have colors similar to flowers, and one theory suggests that trichromatic color vision in primates has evolved to better detect and evaluate edible fruits. From an olfactory perspective, floral volatiles are chemically similar or even identical to those emitted by fruits, and thus smelling a flower may possibly bring to mind a ripe, sweet fruit. Psychology Today's article says  it more simply:  dopamine. Dopamine is triggered by the expectation of a reward. Flowers were a huge reward signal in the world our brain evolved in because they marked the coming of abundance after a hungry winter. Today we have enough to eat all year round so we don’t consciously link flowers with food. But the blossoming of a flower triggers the sense that something special is coming because it triggers dopamine. Isn't it nice to know we can look at flowers and get the same effect as a physical  fitness class. Here are two views of the Laking Garden.

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Halloween History - 94,000,000

There are 94,000,000 results for the search halloween history.  This is a sizeable number.  Halloween is very popular - Christmas history has 179,000,000 results, likely the most popular celebration search.  However, my search results seem uninteresting, so let me turn to the rich history of the land that the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, sits on. The Royal Botanical Gardens sit on an ancient gravel sandbar known as Burlington Heights.  This land feature was created millions of years ago by Lake Ontario's predecessor lake, Lake Iroquois.  Burlington Heights was a significantly sizeable 'sand bar' created by this lake. Lake Iroquois's shoreline came through Toronto just a few blocks north of my house at Royal York.  Looking at the 'approximate location map', I expect my brother's back garden at Royal York and Eglinton is part of the shoreline - it is a sandy hillside. Burlington Heights separates Cootes Paradise Marsh on the west from Hamilton harbour on the east.  It has been a gathering place for thousands of years. Archeological discoveries date from 1000 to 800AD at Princess Point, and it was thought the settlements were from 400BC to 1000AD. Cootes Bay was identified as a bird paradise by Europeans - typically the quote is 'enjoyable for naturalists and sportsmen alike'.  One of the most famous paintings of Cootes Bay is by Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, John Simcoe.  It is dated 1796. It is repeatedly described as a paradise, and eventually became part of the name. This area had the largest number of bird species ever found in one place. It is still home to the highest concentration of plant species in Canada.  Everything was in abundance: it was designated a fish sanctuary by 1874, and became a formal provincial game sanctuary in 1927.   Coyotes Bay gave us nature's abundance, and Halloween gives us the weird and wonderful. This picture comes from the toy store window in Santa Fe - the quote is one of the versions of "Most everyone is made here" - by the cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

And the Winner...

My inbox tells me that Michael's, the craft store, is SLIME headquarters and that Spring camp is next weekend. We just finished the Coldest Night fund-raiser on Saturday.  Winter and Spring are overlapping somehow.  Perhaps it is the anticipation of Spring that has us starting early.  The real break in Ontario is the middle of March - the 13th to the 17th.   I missed seeing the Oscars mix-up for the best picture award last night, with the 'winners' in progress of accepting the Oscar before the correction was made and the declaration that they had lost.  An exciting event in the Oscars that will replay thousands of times, like Jimmy Kimmel's famous tweet to Donald Trump.  We're looking at pictures from yesterday's Royal Botanical Garden's Orchid Society Show.  Spectacular specimens from all over Ontario in displays that showcase these beautiful and complicated plants.  What a lot of camera equipment - the macro ring light was hugely popular, and I could see why.  One can bring it close to the flowers, correct the light temperature, and have even light on the flower.

Join Me April 10 at RBG!

Join Me! Next Sunday I will be the speaker at the annual meeting of the Lily Society.  This is a free event open to the public.  And this is one of my favourite topics and activities - finding 'public' gardens within easy reach.  I would be so pleased if you can be there. April 10, 2016 2:00pm - Ontario Regional Lily Society (at the Royal Botanical Gardens, 680 Plains Road West. Burlington, Rooms 1 & 2)  Great Public Gardens in Your Own Backyard If you live within the Golden Horseshoe and surrounding Toronto area, you can visit more than 30 public gardens within easy driving distance. Some will be new to you and others will be familiar.  You'll see them all at their best.   Get your schedules out because you'll want to get to these glorious gardens so close to home and easy to visit.

Spring Experience

I am looking forward to the beautiful cherry trees at Royal Botanical Gardens.  This tree is in the Arboretum and is an ancient Japanese Cherry.  I used Topaz Lens Effects to get the motion blur in the second image.  

Garden Benches

Hi everyone,
I seem to be drawn to garden benches.  They are meant for us humans, so make the garden a human place.  They are invitational to sit and enjoy, and they provide a resting place for the eye in the landscape too.

Everywhere I go, I just seem to find them.  Of course, going to a lot of gardens does mean I find a lot of them.  If you know of any beautiful benches, it would so wonderful to hear from you.

My favourites so far this there have been the Royal Botanical Gardens benches in the Mediterranean Greenhouse with that beautiful variegated Bouganvillea framing it and in the Rock Garden with the tulips framing the bench with their vivid colour display.  These pictures are from April 2013.

This last bench is in the Harry P. Lieu Garden in Orlando Florida in February.  It is particularly pretty with the Camellias framing it, and the light patterns.

All my best,
Marilyn

Koi The Living Art

Hi everyone,
I was in the conservatory at the Royal Botanical Gardens recently.  The conditions were perfect with perfect light on the Koi swimming in the pond.  The Koi there are very comfortable with people, making photography very easy.  The two images show the pond as it is with the perfect black water.  The second is an interpreted image showcasing the Koi as the Living Art.

Spring Blossoms on the Way

It may be snowing right now in Grimsby...yet this beautiful Japanese Cherry tree in the Royal Botanical Gardens Cherry Grove, will be blooming in a few weeks.  

The signs of spring are here:  Canada Blooms starts this week on Friday March 15, 2013 in Toronto, and there's an opening of my floral and marvelling the mushroom works at the Toronto Botanical Gardens March 14 - June 13.

RBG - Solitary Glow

At RBG last week, this crab apple glowed above the meadow grasses.