cherry blossoms | (so much world, so little time....)

Urban Garden.227

April 12, 2025 | Categories: Netherlands, North Holland & Amsterdam | Tags: cherry blossoms, spring flowers | Leave a comment

Small Wonders.220

This’ll be my last daily post for a while, ending with a reminder to seek and value small wonders in our lives. The cherry blossom pics below were taken on December 30! I first saw some of these trees in bloom on a gray late-November walk in 2021, and was delighted to see some trees in this same set again blooming again more than two years later at the tail-end of the wettest-in-history NL autumn of 2023. (The 2021 blooms were more pink-tinged, so might have been different specific trees but all in the same place.) What a blessing, given how monotonously, monstrously, constantly gray the autumn and winter months can here. Thanks to whatever urban and parks planners associated with the city of A’dam chose these trees to plant here. 🙂 The mushrooms above would have been photographed on my exploratory walks around my new neighborhood, after I moved to this new place in early August. Enjoy this break from daily posts and alerts, as I intend to. Who knows when I’ll be back to dailies.

January 31, 2024 | Categories: Netherlands, North Holland & Amsterdam | Tags: cherry blossoms, Mushrooms, sloterpark, Sloterplas | 1 Comment

County Views.116

Back to Fort Ross State Historic Park in my old home county of Sonoma. This time we visited during the early stages of a school overnight trip, which added to the fun.

April 15, 2023 | Categories: California, SF Bay Area, Sonoma & Napa, United States | Tags: California state parks, cherry blossoms | 1 Comment

Small Wonders.98

Yep, that statue’s of Rembrandt because yep, that’s Rembrantplein or Rembrandt Square.

April 25, 2022 | Categories: Netherlands, North Holland & Amsterdam | Tags: cherry blossoms | Leave a comment

Small Wonders.75

I photographed these fragrant blossoms on a dawn walk through a frozen Vondelpark the morning of 26 December. (Many more photos of that cold but lovely walk still to come.) I’d already seen such blossoms twice before on walks through the mostly-gray landscapes of autumnal and wintry Amsterdam: I’ve already shown you some photos I took the first time, in Small Wonders.73. That was an interesting experience, because the morning of the day I experienced those blossoms, I had realized the sun had mostly into hiding for the season, and sadly posted my “farewell to summer” entry with the last photo that captured the glory of Amsterdam’s canals on a clear and sunny day. Some weeks after that, I was out for one of my “I must get away from my computer” walks around the neighborhood on a drizzy, wet, gray and cold day during some anti-social phase of the lockdown we’ve all lived through, and I smelled a lovely floral scent in the air…and looked up from the mud puddles I was trying to avoid to notice a bunch of these blossoms sharing the beauty and their fragrance just above my head, along one of the busier streets. Due to the aforementioned rain and mud puddles, I didn’t pull out my camera to photograph those blossoms, but my point is I realized these cherries are truly a miraculous gift of nature to those of us who want a wee pick me up in the grayer days of winter. Thank you, oh cherry blossoms! (At least, I sort of assume they’re cherry blossoms; botanists among you, feel free to add a corrective comment if so needed.)

February 7, 2022 | Categories: Netherlands, North Holland & Amsterdam | Tags: cherry blossoms, Sloterplas | Leave a comment

Small Wonders.73

Shortly after writing the text & posting that “farewell to summer” photo in Urban Canals a day or two ago, I went for a long walk during a break from the rain and saw, yes, these blossoming trees, a whole bunch of them. Go figure. Always something new.

November 30, 2021 | Categories: Netherlands, North Holland & Amsterdam | Tags: cherry blossoms | 2 Comments

Small Wonders.25

May 6, 2021 | Categories: California, SF Bay Area, Sonoma & Napa, United States | Tags: cherry blossoms, Santa Rosa | Leave a comment

Aside

smw, slt has packed up the big bags and moved on for a longer term again. This time we’re off to Papua New Guinea where we expect to be working for a year. This is going to be an interesting assignment for me – new and different context and part of the world for me to work in, also a new role as head of mission. As usual, this will remain a personal blog of the world as seen through my eyes…so more about PNG if, as and when appropriate. For now, my farewell to the land of my birth comes in the form of a photographic essay of my lovely final week there, spent in Washington, DC. Since many of my international friends have never been to the US or DC, I enjoyed taking shots of the city in its springtime glory. DC is a lovely city to visit – excellent free museums you can wander in and out of at will, grand monuments to the many of the great thinkers and founders of the American experiment, and lots of public green space around the mall and monuments. I’ve tried to show some of this, along with the occasional shot of me or my family, some of whom also came down to DC while I was there. Enjoy the shots – I’ll throw in the occasional caption, but I’ve nothing else to really add in terms of text for now. Peace, health, companionship to us all in the coming year.

….this year, one understands, was the 100th anniversary of DC’s famous cherry trees being donated by the nation of Japan. As it happens my visit was perfectly timed to see the trees go from bud to full bloom, thanks to several days of glorious warm sunny weather. Below it’s me enjoying brunch with my little cousin twice-removed, Adair — he’s Amalie & Bryan’s son and they drove down from Baltimore for a really great brunch with me, my mother & brother, and my cousin Maria. Thanks, guys :-).

The Washington Monument is the tallest building in the District of Columbia (and building codes will keep it so), and it’s therefore fairly omnipresent and makes a good focus for — too many, I know… — photos.

From the FDR Memorial.

…above, taken earlier in the week; below, about five days later once the trees had burst into full bloom. That’s the Jefferson Monument, by the way, my personal favorite both because I think it’s the most graceful of the three biggest & oldest monuments, and also because Jefferson was such a great philosopher of democracy, and also a conflicted representative of the ideals he represented: a committed Democrat who had slaves and agreed to the original language of the constitution which gave slaves no rights whatsoever but counted them as partial people for the distribution of political power in the new system (for allocating seats in the House of Representative, if my memory of history serves correctly…)

…Thomas Jefferson: a statue of the man, and some of his words.

Above, from the Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial; below, me in a particpatory art installation on display at the (fantastic, free) Hischorn Gallery.

One of the more unusual monuments is Theordore Roosevelt National Memorial Island, to which I went both in honor of the man who launched our national park system and was the first political leader to recognize the importance, in a nation clearly growing at a very rapid rate, of setting aside open space for future generations to enjoy and for the protection of our natural heritage…and also to remind myself that Republicans have not always been as willfully ignorant, greedy, and dishonest as they seem now to have become. Below are two shots taken from the island; one shows the Watergate Hotel (yes, site of that infamous incident from which so many later government scandals around the world have drawn their name) as well as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (built to honor JFK of course).

A corner of the old executive office building, some shiny memorial column, and a corner of the mall all on a sunny late afternoon; below another shot of the gables and turrets of the old executive office building.