Saturday, August 14, 2010

Gratuitous nudity (or naked ladies)



More heavy rain here last evening, but it's a glorious morning --- blue skies, a little cooler, the promise of a drying-out time next week (another chance of rain tonight, however).

We mostly call these spectacular pink lilies in bloom far and wide right now "naked ladies," but they have other more decorous names including sprprise, spider, magic and resurrection lilies. These are located on the museum grounds and I apologize for the framing of their portraits. But I was balanced on the retaining wall of the top tier of a terraced planter that drops about 12 feet to patio level and (a) while trying to avoid falling off I was (b) struggling with the "macro" mode of the camera, which means I can't use the view-finder because of the parallax factor, while facing into the sun.


I'm not sure if these are grown everywhere, but because they flourish so readily they probably are. Officially Lycoris squamigera (how's that for an ugly name?), their substantial bulbs send up generous foliage in the spring, which then yellows, dies down and disappears. About this time of year, as if by magic, two-foot stalks pop through the ground apparently overnight and burst like firecrackers into full bloom. It's quite a show. Since their stems are "naked," they really work best when incorporated into other plantings, but wherever they are they're surely pretty.

+++

Multi-culturalism is a wonderful thing, but while fiddling with the new camcorder yesterday afternoon I accidentally changed its language to Polish. Whoops. Faced with a series of menu options, all in Polish, I couldn't figure out how to get back to the one I needed to open in order to undo the damage. Finally, I just went through a couple of dozen options until the right one showed up. Ain't technology grand?

Here's a photo of Otterbein Church, also on the museum campus, also taken this morning. Isn't it great to see that blue sky among the pin oak leaves?


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