These are from the same garden as our last lovely solo-photo post. Mirror selfie in both images below, though perhaps impossible for you to see it in the right-hand one.
These images are all from the same garden, including the long corridor with doorways on both ends through which one accesses it from the street (you’ll see the green open-garden sign on the street-side door), and an extra door at the back of the garden, from which vantage point I took the shot above. Lovely layout 🙂
So today on the summer solstice, in Amsterdam the sun will be above the horizon for 16 hours, 48 minutes and 28 seconds – meaning effectively about 18-1/2 hours of daylight or twilight in the sky. Long days mean lots of sun for the plants to grow fast and furious. We’ve just had (last weekend) Amsterdam’s Open Garden Days, showcasing some of that lovely growth. I visited this year for the first time (managing only about 10 of the 25 gardens), and assembled more than enough lovely photos to merit a special series which we’ll be sharing over the coming five days. These ten posts will share glimpses of what are truly Urban Gardens at their peak in the northern summer. This particular series began in May 2020, while I was on lockdown in Bangladesh without regularly-scheduled airline passenger service for many months, trying to walk and enjoy the covid-quieter city by way of outdoor and work-life balance. Mostly, I’ve shared in this series photos of parks, container gardens or plant vendors such as in that first post more than three years ago. But for the coming days, you’ll see true gardens, many of them private (like this one), some at museums, and all behind the houses and thus not visible to casual passersby. Enjoy 🙂
Winding down the photos I took on my short visit in Abidjan, end of April. Thought I’d already posted this — if you view it on a larger screen, or enlarge the image, you’ll see the daily dusk flight of the fruit bats going off to do their nightly foraging. I believe I recall once reading that fruit bats are among the most important pollinators for the world’s most popular fruit, the mango — several of which I greatly enjoyed while there, so, hey – thanks, fruit bats!
One last flower from my last visit in Africa for my friend Jean, who told me after an earlier Urban Gardens post featuring this very planter of flowers what they are: ruellia. Thanks, Jean – you are definitely one of my most steady and engaged readers, and it’s readers like you who keep me going 🙂
Buiksloterbreek Park, in a part of Noord Amsterdam that I hadn’t previously visited. (In case you’d like an orientation linked to past posts: north of the Ij, to the right and in this case further west i.e. farther away from where these photos from Muziekgebouw and Bimhuis were taken.)
Sometimes an urban canal may look like a country canal – but as with our last entry in this series, note the high-rises in the background…and I think we we’re in the city limits of A’dam at this point on the bike path :-).
(so much world, so little time....) 