Blast from the past - Spring in Portland

Though this blog started only in May 2007, my love for photographing trees and buildings goes back much further than that. I would print my pictures and make scrapbooks and spend many hours looking through them. It was hence not easy for me to move to a digital camera... I thought, quite naively, that it would be the end of my scrap book, as I would not bother printing pictures anymore. Little did I know of the wonderful world of blogs then! In this 'blast from the past' series, I'm going to attempt to post using some of my initial adventures using the digital camera. I seem to have more pictures of buildings than of the trees though, from those days.

Cherry blossoms along the Williamette's Tom McCall waterfront park. Not mine, credit goes to Wiki.

picture courtesy Wikipedia Commons

Gardening...a visit to my grandmother's terrace garden

My grandmother acquainted me with some of her flowering and non-flowering plants today. All of her flora are confined to pots as the terrace outside of her kitchen is her garden space.

I ate some tulsi leaves (basil).

I admired the flowers although it was evening and most of them had closed - yellow alamandas (pots result in dwarf varieties), pink and white tulips (or lilies?), orange kanagambarams (not to be mistaken for balsam) whose english name no one could remember, two varieties of malli (jasmine), small pink roses, the new pink flowers on the cactus that my mother had bought for her on her bday this year. The portulacas, gardenia and tube rose plants (that i mistook for tulips) also fell in the flowering category though they were bereft of flowers when i saw them.

The tomato plants, like my mother's, had refused to bear fruit. She had not given up on them yet though.

THe many varieties of non flowering and yet absolutely stunning crotons posed against the walls and on the parapet - the classic green and red big leaved ones, the ones with lotus shaped green leaves that had a pink haze, the ones iwth dark green oval leaves with pink pin stripes and the ones with green and white leaves ( that reminded me of an alligator) and ferns (which my grandmother said needed a pot with a bigger radius to fall out of) 

The coin(?) plants mesmerized me with their shiny round leaves. The anonymous plant with little red leaves (that I promptly popped a leaf of into my mouth when is was told that it was edible ) and the other with dull green leaves with beautiful white borders made me think that i ought to have a little balcony garden when i have a place of my home.

The money plant overflowed from its pot and was crawling on the ground. There were 2 tulsi plants, one of whose leaves were tastier than the other. And the best of them all was the thyme with its beautiful flower shaped leaves and wonderful oh so familiar smell (used in garlands in india and in cooking around the world.)

Gardening is such a wonderful hobby!