If you can’t make it to Japan for this year’s cherry blossom viewing, you can stop by the botanical garden in Wichita, where the Okame cherry1 is just coming into bloom.
There are more pictures here.
Category: Photo gallery
Fuzzy danger
Orchids may get most of the attention here nowadays, but I sill grow plenty of cacti and other succulents.
The hooked central spines of Mammillaria pennispinosa are as sharp as they look.
Pleiospilos nelii, above, and Hoodia gordonii are coming along nicely.
Token orchid: the little octopus, Prosthechea cochleata, is blooming again.
There are more pictures here.
Snapshots from the future
Above is a list of some of the files in my camera this afternoon. Evidently it is unstuck in time. Some of the pictures that I took tomorrow at the botanical garden are below the fold.
Apricots in January
Another orchid opened its first blooms this weekend. This one is Cattleya Aloha Apricot. It is more frequently listed as a Sophrolaeliocattleya [SLC], but Sophronitis and most of Laelia recently have been lumped into the Cattleya genus, so it’s just a Cattleya now. It’s a compact plant, eight inches high including the pot, and the flowers are two-and-a-half inches in diameter.
Another month…
… another orchid society meeting. This time the show-and-tell included a tiny Dendrobium and several nice Cattleyas. There are more pictures here.
Christmas present, 2019
Once again, one of my plants opened its first flower on Christmas day. This year it was Coelogyne graminifolia.2 (Last year was Prosthechea cochleata.) There are a few more pictures here.
Pinned
I discovered this in the sole of my shoe when I returned from my recent trip. It’s about a half-inch long. Fortunately, it went into the rubber at an angle and thus missed my foot.
Before Kraftwerk
I spent a week out of town visiting friends. Most of the time I left the camera in its case, but I couldn’t resist grabbing a snapshot of this old-style transistorless pocket calculator.
I also found a bit of color in the guest bedroom/auxiliary closet where I stayed. There are more pictures here.
Recovered
Oncidium Tsiku Marguerite arrived back in May in spike. June came, it got hot, and the plant went into shock. It just sat there, the spikes not developing, until October, when the weather finally cooled a little. This week it finally bloomed. The flowers are not quite an inch long, and have a light sweetish fragrance. They’re a a bit pinker than I expected, but I’m not complaining. There are a few more pictures here.
Pretty ones, weird ones
The first batch of pictures from the orchid show are up. Although I spotted two Dracula plants, neither was in bloom. However, there was a Habenaria medusa in flower, which will probably be in the next batch. You can see the pictures here.
Looking for Dracula?
You might be able to find a Dracula orchid plant for sale at the Kansas Orchid Society’s annual show and sale, held this weekend at Botanica here in Wichita.
You might also see Maxthompsonara Bryon Rinke, a multi-generic Zygopetalinae hybrid bred at Sunset Valley Orchids, first flowered by Bryon Rinke of the KOS and named for Max Thompson at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. You might even see Max and Bryon.
There definitely will be several tables full of blooming orchids, plus plants for sale. I’ll be there taking too many pictures, as usual.
Let’s get small
Although there were some mid-size to large blooms at this month’s orchid society show-and-tell, the stand-out for me was the smallest, Platystele umbellata, above. The entire cluster of burgundy flowers was roughly a quarter-inch in diameter. It was difficult to photograph — I really needed a macro lens (ideally with another lens stacked in front, and with the camera connected to the computer for focus stacking) and a tripod — but after several tries I managed to get a passable picture.
The Platystele was dwarfed by Stelis viridipurpurata, which was nevertheless quite small itself. Each flower was about a quarter-inch across.
There are more pictures here, including Habenarias.
In addition to the usual close-up photos, I also made some panoramas of the botanical garden this past weekend, such as this view of the lily pond. (Panoramas look best in the full-screen mode.)
There are more views of Botanica at my panorama page. (Click the “recent” tab.)
That new church smell …
St. Joseph Church, Andale, Kansas
… is curing varnish.
St. Joseph Church in Andale, Kansas, isn’t actually a “new” church. The current building was probably built during the first quarter of the 20th century (the parish history is vague on specific dates). However, it was damaged by a lightning-caused fire last year and has only recently been reopened after repairs and renovations.
Unlike most of the churches that I’ve been photographing, St. Joseph actually looks like a Catholic church, not a box or a spaceship.
The panorama is best viewed in the full-screen mode.
Back again to the garden
I spent yesterday afternoon at the botanical garden, this time with an ordinary zoom lens. There was relatively little color outside, but I found some. There was more at the orchid society meeting inside, where the room was refrigerated air-conditioned. There are more pictures here.
The sky below
When I last visited the botanical garden, I took the fisheye lens instead of the macro. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the panorama tripod head with me, so all the garden panoramas came out too glitchy to post. The above was salvaged from one of the waterlily pond.
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A few odds and ends:
Zappa fans might find this old advertisement oddly familiar:
Saints in space
Here’s another example of a faddish round church built in the later 20th century, All Saints in Wichita. It’s not ugly, but it reminds me more of main deck of a spaceship than a place of worship. It was dedicated in 1965, a year before the debut of the original Star Trek, so it’s probably safe for altar boys to wear red cassocks.
To view the detailed interactive panorama, click here.
Incidentally, the pastor of All Saints, Fr. Hien, whom I remember as an energetic and cheerful seminarian, is a refugee from Viet Nam who’s had an interesting life (PDF).