These photos were taken on average about a week apart. The first was taken the day after planting, and they are in chronological order.
They’ll continue to bloom for many months now 🙂
Archive for the ‘Garden’ Category
Time Lapse
Monday, June 16th, 2014In The Fight Between 2 Geezers And Montreal… The Sun Wins!
Thursday, August 8th, 2013Today, after a very early start, we took the subway to the 1976 Olympics location. Although the stadium and other venues are still there, our destination was the Biodome, which is a sort of indoor zoo.
That’s Jim with one of the locals.
The Biodome contains 4 ‘biomes’, which are separate habitats that represent three parts of Canada and… well the fourth is tropical rainforest! Each is very large and has controlled temperature and a variety of animals and plants to see. It’s very impressive.
Here are shots from the rainforest section:
And the Canadian wilderness section (can you see the beaver swimming?):
And the Canadian Atlantic coast:
That’s a sturgeon Jim is admiring. The massive tank (which has surface viewing as well) is full of them. Me; I’m pointing to an evil fish. Don’t believe me…?
Maybe he has a good heart?
The final section was arctic, which meant the animals (birds) were behind glass in their cooled enclosures. The penguins were particularly popular with the visitors:
All in all, the Biodome is a very impressive place to spend a couple of hours, and you should visit if you’re in town.
The lovely filly concierge at our hotel had recommended the botanical gardens to me yesterday, and since it was a hop and a skip from the Biidome we hopped (and skipped) over.
The entry cost included the intriguing ‘Insectarium’ and it was this that we visited first.
What a surprise! This was an amazing collection of insects (most dead, but many alive) from all over the world sorted by family of colour or habitat or diet etc., etc. There were thousands to admire, and the presentation was as good as any I have seen.
(Yes, that’s my hand!)
Perhaps the highlight was an ingenious display of leaf cutter ants, crafted in such a way as to give guests the chance to watch them harvest and then carry leave pieces to their nests:
Awesome stuff! In my opinion, the insectarium alone made the ticket worthwhile, and we hasn’t even really entered the gardens themselves…
Anyway the Gardens are where it’s at here in Montreal right now, because of a topiary art installation. You know what that is: sculpture from plants. They can draw big crowds for this stuff?
I’m going to cut right to the chase:
The ‘Tree of Birds’! 16 feet high, 18 feet wide, dozens of tonnes and 56 birds all made with plants (over an aluminium frame, of course).
It was – and I’m not a big fan of this word – amazing!
But wait…..
Look at her! Gaia, The Earth Mother, rising 5 meters tall, deer in one hand and a waterfall in the other, all made of plants. It was awesome.
All told there were over 50 of these sculptures, ranging from ‘better than anything I could ever do’ to ‘difficult to believe it’s even possible’. Here’s a few more examples:
I was a particular fan of the orangutan, which very effectively used a type of brown grass for the fur. Needless to say, this exhibit (and the gardens overall) was absolutely worth seeing.
Did you see the bright sun in those photos? Well it saw us, especially the fact we had no sunscreen on since when we left the hotel rain was forecast.
My plan to stave off the inevitable sunburn by applying sunscreen after hours in the hot sun seems to have failed. In the afternoon we went for a walk around Old Montreal, but clearly by that point we had been ruined by a mixture of sunstroke and dehydration, and if it wasn’t for the (no joke!) over 2 hours of post carding and blogging I may have fallen asleep at 8:30 like Jim did 🙂
Timelapse
Monday, May 13th, 2013Remember in yesterdays post when I mentioned making a timelapse video of the camera photos? Well I did something clever:
That’s about half of the photos compiled into a timelapse video! About 6 days separates the first and last shot.
Toward the end you can see two frames of a furry rogue being very close to the camera! Very shortly after those photos the camera was knocked over, which is why the viewing angle changes afterwards 🙂
We Live With Animals!
Sunday, May 12th, 2013Ok fellows, time again for some candid camera backyard snaps! This entry is a good one…
Firstly, I set the camera up leaning against our house looking directly in the backyard onto the grass. I left it there for a few days and… almost no animal photos! However, by sheer coincidence our backyard neighbour was having a tree removed during this period and the entire process was captured in about 300 photos 🙂
Interesting… but not furry! However this next one – one of the very few animal shots captured during that period, is most definitely interesting:
Now I’m no zoologist, but that to me looks like either:
a) A bear
b) A cougar
c) A thylacine
Sadly, with no further photos of the mysterious beast, accurate identification may remain elusive.
I then moved the camera, placing it on the patio angled toward the tree you see in the right side of the above pictures. Here was the new vista when moved:
This was a good spot! It seems this little tree sits atop a backyard highway, since over the next few days many types of beast wandered into shot. I’ll not show the usual suspects (squirrels, birds) and focus on two visitors.
Here’s a rabbit hopping into view:
And here, my friends, is an up-until-now elusive opossum:
Look at that ratty tail and pointed snout. Could this be the same guy I saw with my own eyes years ago?
Now we cut to about a week later (ignore the date stamp on the photos; I never bother to set it when). For Christmas we received a brand new squirrel feeder. It is a wheel on an axel that rotates freely and has place to put three corn cobs. In addition, I purchased a different feeder myself, which hangs a food block off a spring. About two weeks ago we installed these and set a camera on them. Here’s an establishing shot:
300 photos would be captured in this spot, about 90% of them containing squirrels making use of their feeders. Here’s two examples:
The photos not containing squirrels fall into two categories:
1) Night photos, that almost always contain only deer, and
2) Photos of birds
Here is a night example:
And here is a bird example:
That’s a bluejay. We have yet to see any squirrels attempt to feed from the new hanging feeder (as opposed to the corncob feeder hanging behind it). I think it may be too far from the branch.
By the way, compare the lushness of the greenery in the above shot to the establishing shot above. Only six days separate the two. Next year I should do a timelapse in early spring to show the growth of the trees and ferns.
Now we get to the good stuff, as in the really good stuff. I also moved the camera to look directly at the rotating feeder, and switched it over to video mode. It was set to record 30 second clips, and during the very first night hit the jackpot. Here are four such clips edited together:
Yes, that’s a raccoon! Possibly the same guy we captured in a photo a few weeks back. According to the timestamps, he was there for about 14 minutes in total. Cute little bugger, isn’t he? 🙂
So the list is squirrels, chipmunks, deer, birds, cats, rabbits, opossum and raccoons that we have caught on our cameras over the years. We know of three other mammals we know to visit our backyard that have still not been captured on film. Will I ever see them? Can you guess what they are?
Lawn Invaders
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013I’m sitting at home sick right now, playing the utterly-without-decency PS3 game Lollipop Chainsaw (and loving it, by the way). I just got up to put something in the oven for lunch and noticed something in our back yard.
But first, a little backstory. The other day I went for a long walk to scout out an area suitable for launching rockets (as suggested by yesterday’s tweet, and which will be tomorrow’s blog entry). On my walk I noticed a certain yellow flower abundant in some lawns but not others. Upon arriving home, I was happy to see that so far our lawn was free.
I speak, of course, of dandelions.
Anyone with any sort of lawn will have an opinion of these guys, and it is rarely good. They come from nowhere seemingly overnight, and are an ugly, ugly plant (and flower) that stakes a claim on your lawn that lasts for a few weeks. They are the hydras of the plant world: cut off a stalk and find two the next day.
Where there were none in our back yard two days ago there are now hundreds.
As a child I loved dandelions. We called them wet-your-beds because, as every kid knows, if you handle them you (won’t!) wet your bed the next night. I handled them often, since I had a bizarre kids love of using the latex that leaks from their broken stalks like white blood as a glue. Try it one day: tear open a dandelion and glue your palms together using the white stuff. Childish fun 🙂
For all of their ugliness and for as much as I don’t want them on my lawn I can’t deny that when they seed they become quite special. I still can’t resist kicking the ‘puff’ and watching the seeds disperse in the wind, even as I know I am just dooming my lawn for the next year.
As I said to a woman on my walk the other day, in the war against dandelions, I simply let them win.