The Botanic Gardens

Fruit bats. Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney


Wisteria and Palms from the Botanic Gardens Restaurant

Was invited to lunch the day before Christmas Eve at the Botanic Gardens. So I spent a very pleasant half hour in the gardens photographing some beautiful trees (not shown here)

After lunch, I spent a considerable sum of money in the garden's shop. The excuse was Christmas. They had some stunning books (too expensive for me, most of them), some beautiful original botanic artworks (ditto) and other things (also lovely) which were a bit more within range. But there was no dross. (Or was it my alcoholic euphoria?)

(The bat photograph was taken just outside the restaurant facing the garden's shop.)

The Zoo

Taronga Park Zoo. Water bird exhibit with casuarinas in the sunlight and a very obscured pelican.


Araucaria cunninghamii from the skyway. (Such a splendid tree.)


Tiger. (He was exceedingly handsome.)

Went to Taronga Park Zoo, with the children and the grandchildren. It was a lovely day. Both children enjoyed all the animals they saw and so did we. The displays of the animals were the most natural I have seen in a zoo (or anywhere) with most of the barriers being apparently insignificant and not impeding your view. And most of the enclosures appeared remarkably natural. (And in the case of the waterbirds, they were not enclosed at all, despite the jabirus and brolgas on display and lots of pelicans in addition to the various ducks.) The credit for the lovely displays must go to the gardeners as well as the designers.

The price was a bit steep ($23 concession!) but did include as many rides on the skyway as you pleased, a fact I only discovered when I pulled out my money to ride.

We got to see a platypus in what appeared to its natural environment. Fabulous. This was a first for me, not for the sight of a platypus, but for seeing it other than in a most artificial and ugly environment.

Figs in Hyde Park

Figs in Hyde Park

Was with R. yesterday. She is profoundly depressed and there is nothing I can do.

We went shopping. I had wanted to choose a gift for her, with her. I ended up buying dresses for the grandchildren and nothing for her, and when I left her, I was leaving her to see them. It makes me miserable to see her so sad.

She is dreading coming up to her father's and I am frightened about her driving, when she is not happy. But I know that when we drive together and are slightly on edge, we both drive worse, so it makes no sense to offer to drive her to Pokolbin. (Not that she would be likely to accept.)

(The photo was taken on the walk from her place to go shopping at DJs. Hyde Park was lovely, except for the fact that they have removed all the Morton Bays next to St Mary's and now there is no lovely cloak of green to distance that monstrous pile.)

Home

Looking down on to my back verandah


Morning glory infesting the bottlebrush


View from the carport

Well, these photos say I am home. And it's very nice to be home. Even the weeds are lovely.

The Web

Mangroves on the flood tide. QUT.


Cassia javanica. The Women's College.


Leopard tree with new leaves. The Women's College.

It is an amazing new world. This morning, still pursuing documentation for my flower and plant photos, I was pointed to the EOL (Encyclopaedia of Life) site. It is still extremely rudimentary. But it plans to point to all the various pieces of documentation about a species. Australian plants don't yet exist. But where there are entries, they look pretty good. Check it out.

It took me to the BioDiversity Heritage Library site, which appears to be putting up every journal/book that has been published since people started naming plants and animals. They are making available the facsimiles for us to read, and using optical readers to index every text. Again, they scarcely seem to have touched Antipodean stuff but perhaps I am expecting too much. But check out this Joseph Banks publication.

The photos are of the mangroves this morning on the flood tide at QUT, the beautiful new bronze tiny feathered leaves of the leopard tree, and of the Cassia which has come into greater bloom since I first saw it a few days ago. The masked lapwing is still sitting on her second set of eggs (I think it's a least two weeks and if I don't see chicks on Friday morning then I won't see them at all this year, since I'm off down to Sydney on Friday.) Her bloke came up to protect her when I took her photograph, so it's not all as solo as at times it has appeared.

Cassia javanica

The tree.


Flowering branches.


Detail: Flowers and leaves.

The usual story: Collected on camera, id'd on the internet, thanks to Flickr. The leaves, trunk and habit are not unlike a Jacaranda, but I'd been puzzling over some seedpods on the Women's College drive: a long cylindrical pod, with two seams running the length of it, splitting open to show a set of seeds each within a disc of width about 3-4 mm of material, the length of the pod being up to 40 cm or more. Puzzle no longer. They belong to this tree: Cassia javanica.

Sunday

Southbank rainforest walk. Palms and weeping figs.


Tipuana tipu. UQ Lakes.

I've been reading Manzoni's 'The Betrothed' (I promessi sposi). Now in retrospect, it feels like the lives of the saints. But it is a delight to read. From the very first event, where the priest Don Abbondio is accosted by two bravoes and we have three pages quoting the various edicts by which these bravoes are to be discouraged.

"Hearing such bold and confident words from so great a noble, and such orders going with them, one would be very much inclined to think that all the bravoies disappeared for ever at their very sound. But the evidence of a nobleman no less authoritatative and no less endowed with titles obliges us to believe quite the contrary. ...

And wherever he touches on history there is always this delicate irony. Fantastic stuff. A most extraordinary book: we go from character to character with interludes of beautifully ironic history - history, which has been deeply internalised and now comes out as natural conversation. And it's always a conversation with you, the reader. And it's a tale of terrible times: immense lawlessness, war, famine and pestilence, encompassed in a tale of Milan and its environs from 1628 to 1630.

"The people had tried to create abundance by sacking and burning, the government was trying to maintain it be the gallows and the rope. Such means were linked to each other, but the reader can see how little they had to do with the ends; and in a moment he will see just what avail they wre to attain them. It is easy to see, and not uninteresting to observe, how there was a necessary connexion between these measures; each was an inevitable consequence of its predecessor, and all a result of the first decree which fixed the price of bread so far from its real price - from the price, that is, that would have resulted naturally from the relation between supply and demand. .... But then, as the consequences gradually began to be felt, it became the duty of those responsible to come to the relief of each edict with a law forbidding people to do what they had been encouraged to do by the preceding law."

"Man's activity is limited; and the more of it is put into giving orders, the less goes into carrying them out. What goes into the sleeves cannot go into the gussets."

Paths

Hoop pines. Araucaria cunninghamii


Near the UQ Post office

Had to buy stamps for Christmas cards, today. And send a parcel. It was stinking hot and horrible by 9am when the Post office opened. And today was the day for buying boxes to store my stuff here over Christmas, so that meant I left the uni early. Fortunately, because by five there was a violent thunderstorm. Not the weather for carrying cardboard boxes.

The bright sunlight and dark shade on the UQ paths took my fancy as I headed off to work.

Last row

Stacked oars in the UQ Boathouse, with boats in the background

Our last row this morning. We had seven and we rowed seven and we all rowed most of the time. The only time all seven were not rowing was when we were manoevring to get in to the pontoon and when we were turning about. A. (our coach) stayed at the stern the entire time - I presume to make sure she knew precisely where we were headed.

It's an amazing world. There is a living all around the world for rowing coaches and A. is off to Inniskillen in the new year to take up a rowing coaching post, while most of us have had a pretty positive experience and intend to keep on next year, rowing fours not eights in the early new year. A far cry from when I was a girl growing up and such a sport was simply not offered.

But here, the college (perhaps 200 girls) field 5 fours, which is 25 girls with the coxes, and so do all the other nine colleges.

Lily?

Common as dirt. And lovely. And I don't know what it is. (UQ)

I wasn't a fan of my photos today. But I did like the stamens of this. One of the things I like about taking photos of flowers is that I generally need to magnify the image and in doing so, I see in the photo what I don't see when I just look. So here, when I see these normally, I see the ragged flower, but today I saw the stamens standing quite free of the flower. And the parts with all the pollen are hanging quite vertically, yet the flower itself is all over the place.

And the paperbark flower below, seen carelessly, looks something like a bottle brush, but when you see it up close, what an amazing structure it has.


Paperbark. UQ.

Sunlight

Sunlight through the grass

Taken a long while ago and has just one comment on it in Flickr, but I came across it while hunting for some other photos and I still think it is beautiful. And I also love that very slight morning moisture in the air, invisible, except that it captures the shafts of sunlight.

Putting up this photo reminded me that I had wanted to go out in the dark to get a photo of the Kigelia, whose buds I had noticed the other day. Such a beautiful flower and only visible by flashlight. It's so elegant, as it hangs, like a living candelabra.

On the way out, I disturbed the nesting lapwing, nesting for the second time this season in the very safe spot of the grassed college roundabout. I very evilly took a flash of it, and it made appropriate menacing cries. She/he (is it the female who keeps the eggs warm?) has been sitting there I think for almost a week already. Seems an awfully long time to go without food, and by sitting there it reminds you of the miserable weather it must endure, which you tend not to think about when birds are on the wing or sitting on a shady branch.


Kigelia pinnata. African sausage tree. UQ.