Love irises. We had them at our wedding almost 16 years ago. Can someone please remind me to buy some next fall to plant in my own garden? Sometime after October 18, because my middle son’s bar-mitzvah is that weekend, so I will be a tad busy up until then.
So glad I have neighbors that grow these purple beauties that I can photograph for my blog.
Can anyone name these lovely orange flowers? They look a bit like snapdragons from a distance, but when one gets up close, one can see the petals are not like those of a snapdragon. I think the orange looks nice with the purple of the iris, don’t you? I found these orange flowers growing in front of a business on Raritan Avenue in Highland Park.
A detail of the orange flower: is it a snapdragon? Or something else?
For more flowers, visit Today’s Flowers:
This post is dedicated to the many U.S. soldiers who have died for American freedom and for world freedom. Monday, May 25 is Memorial Day in the United States.
Yes, it is another exciting episode of What Do You See?, brought to you by Leora and her daughter. The daughter specifically requested that this be put online. Any thoughts, ideas, ponderings about what is going on this drawing?
Upcoming in Highland Park: Memorial Day Parade down Raritan Avenue (starts in New Brunswick – Highland Park scouts and teams start at South Adelaide) – See Memorial Day Parade 2008
Elsewhere on the Web
Ilana-Davita is taking the Trep challenge and walking. I’ve been doing gardening as exercise, so Ilana-Davita asks if it hurts my back? Links on digging without backache:
I think the key is I never spend more than ten minutes at a time gardening. I do it in between everything else. Am I holding the spade properly? I have no idea. I just noticed both those links are from the UK; is it because more UK folks are gardeners?
Deep Vein Thrombosis – one of the causes is sitting too long in one spot, like on a plane (I know someone who had similar problems after returning from Israel – get up and walk around on a long plane ride).
Wall of the Old City, Jerusalem, July 2008
Fifty years ago Jews could not walk here, along the walls of the Old City. There was a barbed wire fence preventing entrance. In 1967 all this changed, and thus tonight begins Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. After June 1967 not only were Jews and others allowed into the Old City and to visit the Kotel, the City was once again in Jewish control, as it had not been for 2000 years. Jerusalem has been a holy city for the Jewish People since the time of King David.
From Wikipedia, here is what Moshe Dayan said on that day:
This morning, the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour—and with added emphasis at this hour—our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights. We did not come to Jerusalem for the sake of other peoples’ holy places, and not to interfere with the adherents of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and to live there together with others, in unity.
Posts on Jerusalem Day or about Jerusalem in the news:
I used a plugin called WordPress Gallery Slideshow to create this slideshow of the annual Highland Park Street Fair on May 17, 2009. There was also a 5K Run in the morning that ran close to my home; you can see one tired friend who did a great job of running pictured in his lime green t-shirt in the slideshow. The run was in memory of Riki Jacobs, a Highland Park resident and social justice advocate who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
One advantage to slideshows as opposed to posts of individual pictures is that sometimes you don’t have a lot to say about each photo, but you have a lot of photos to show. See if you can find the photo of me squinting at my daughter who has taken the picture. Raritan Avenue was crowded and diverse, as it always is on Street Fair day.
I liked the booth of paint your own bags the best. For $3/for a plain white canvas bag, kids painted the bags with acrylic paints. More on the paint your own bags booth in a coming “Guess what it will be” post soon.
Yellow Tulip on Red Azaleas, May 2009
I took this photo a few weeks ago. Since then, the azaleas are still in bloom but the yellow tulip with touches of red has shed its petals.
In camera news, my new Canon 75-300mm zoom lens was returned to Adorama last week because I kept getting err_99 on the camera. On the third day of using the lens. The first two days were an absolute joy; I could capture bokeh (the fuzzy backdrop with clear subject) like never before. Well, a new one is being shipped, and UPS tracking claims it is somewhere in Edison. I am impatiently awaiting its arrival. One of my friends was glad he has a Nikon.
There’s an expression in Hebrew: Marbeh nechasim, marbeh da’agot. Loosely translated, it means the more stuff you got, the more worries.
For more photos with a little or a lot of red, visit Ruby Tuesday, hosted by Mary:
My neighbor has this lovely pink shrub that overhangs into my backyard. Guild-rez has just written in a comment that the shrub is weigela. According to Wikipedia, the genus is named after the German scientist Christian Ehrenfried Weigel.
I enjoy photographing all these cascades of pink bugle-like flowers.
Bees were happily flying all about the andromeda shrub in front of my house. My daughter was afraid of the bees, but I told her they were much more interested in the flowers than in her.
Basil and Oregano have Germinated, May 2009
I look forward to making pesto with all the basil I have in my tray. I put in some oregano seeds, too; I do not know what I am going to do with this much oregano. I am working on converting all of my front yard into perennials (with some annuals each year, some shrubs already there) and doing away with trying to establish grass without weeds. Maybe I’ll plant some of the oregano there. Some of my neighbors have no grass at all in their front yards (and instead have ground cover and perennials); others dutifully maintain the green, bright strips of lawn.
