3 Free eBooks – October 2016

There were some beautiful books I looked through online in October. Here are my picks for the top 3.

Brooke, E. Adveno. The Gardens of England. London: T. McLean. 1858. Available from the Internet Archive here. The illustrations are a step back into the mid-1800s both in terms of the grand gardens that surrounded large estates and how people interacted with them.

Harrap, Anne and Simon. Orchids of Britain and Ireland: A field and site guide. London: A&C Black. 2010. Available from the Internet Archive here. Skipped ahead by almost 150 years…and color photography! I am always partial the slipper orchids.

Duncan, James; Cuvier, Georges. The Natural History of British Butterflies. Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars. 1840. Available from HathiTrush here. As I looked through the images in this book, I wondered how many of these butterflies still exist. A lot has happened to the environment since 1840.

Enjoy!

Longwood Gardens – December 2015 (Part II)

The rest of Longwood Gardens was – as usual – very beautiful. I’ve selected some themes for this post. The first grouping is some ‘artsy’ attempts inside the conservatory: a bamboo forest,

A bent calla lily and

A simple water feature.

The next group are plants I saw growing outdoors in Hawaii; they only survive the winter in conservatories in Pennsylvannia: a bird of paradise and

A hibiscus.

There were also some landscapes I enjoyed: in the conservatory,

A treehouse at the forest’s edge across a grassy lawn,

Around the model trains and

One of my favorite rooms in the conservatory (there is a water feature that gently flows through the central plantings…which change seasonally).

Usually I take a lot of close ups of the orchids. This time I took the room itself. I’d never quite noticed the spirals behind the pots before.

There was a tiered fountain that had been repurposed as infrastructure for succulents and small aloes. I like the muted colors and shapes.

The last grouping is cycad textures. There were several different kinds in the Longwood Conservatory and I focused on the non-leaf structures.