Rosehip November

I woke up at 10.30 am a few days ago (November 20th) and looked outside while I was putting the kettle on. Everything the sun hadn't yet touched (most things at that time of day) was white with frost.

The grass was stiff and crunchy underfoot.  My toes immediately began to freeze inside my boots. Jesse crouched under the porch going "uuurrrrhh" ("what the hell is this") while I took photos of geranium and buttercup leaves covered in ice crystals. Eventually I got far enough away that he followed me out onto the grass, but he wasn't happy about it.

 

I've held onto these photos for a while, and I don't know what to say about them. I'm just barely hanging on these days. I don't know what to say about anything. There are no words, for some things.

I haven't seen frost in nearly a decade, and I don't have any memory from before of what it was like, or what anything else here was like. It's entirely new to me now. This is not where I wanted to end up, or what I wanted to be doing, but the frost is pretty cool. And I like the rosehips.



The sun on the fields in the afternoon.



Jesse sleeping on my lap while I read and following me around outdoors.



A decaying old snag at the edge of the field that finally succumbed to the wind last week, and fell into a thicket of roses laden with fruit.



A friend showed me this song today:

Rose hip November 
Autumn I'll remember 
Gold landing at our door 
Catch one leaf and fortune will surround you evermore 
Evermore, evermore

Vashti Bunyan (Youtube)

you tread lightly on the surface of this autumn day

It's early October; the days are getting shorter, and the leaves are changing colour.  The colours here are a lot more muted than they are back east, but it's still pretty.  I had forgotten about fall, not having experienced it in so many years, and I'm rediscovering it.

The maple leaves are changing from green to yellow and brown.

Fallen leaves are collecting on the grass:

"October, crisp, misty, golden October, when the light is sweet and heavy." - Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

Halloween is definitely coming; pumpkin spice lattes are advertised outside the coffee shop in town, the drugstore is selling bags of Halloween candy, and there are pumpkins for sale on the roadside outside small farms.

They're between $8 and $15.  Too much for me.

The hardware store has fancy kale plants for sale.  You can actually eat decorative kale, but I don't think people usually do.

Purple-heart kale.

 The blue hydrangeas outside the church are turning purple with the colder weather:

Most of the landscape is still green, though:

Three cows in a neighbour's field.

Someone has grape vines growing on their fence, but the fruit and leaves only start above deer height.  I think it's kind of funny:

 The fir and cedar trees will stay green all year.  Aside from a few sweet gum or Japanese maple trees planted in parks, the only brightly coloured fall foliage you see around here is Himalayan blackberry leaves:

I'm told blackberry leaves make good tea, but I haven't tried it yet.

 The rosehips on the wild rose bushes that are everywhere along the sides of the roads and along fencelines have turned red too:

I took this photo on Eid al-Adha morning this year.  Shortly after, it started to rain hard.

Mist hangs over the fields in the early morning:

I took this photo around 6:30 am, and it was already dissipating.

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

-  'October', Robert Frost (1915)

 I found my first woolly bear.  I must have seen them as a kid, but this one is the first one I can remember:

It's the caterpillar of the Isabella Tiger Moth; I think the caterpillar is a lot more interesting than the adult moth is.  Some fuzzy caterpillars are poisonous and will sting you if you touch them, but woolly bears are harmless.  They hatch in the fall, and Wikipedia tells me that they freeze solid in the winter.  In spring they thaw out and pupate. Once it emerges from its pupa as a moth, it has only days to find a mate. Because the summer is so short in the Arctic, up north they can live through as many as fourteen winters before they eat enough to pupate.

There's an old bit of folklore that says that the bands of brown and black on the woolly bear can be used to predict how severe the coming winter will be, but it doesn't look like anyone's been able to demonstrate that it's accurate:

According to folk wisdom, when the brown bands on fall woolly bears are narrow, it means a harsh winter is coming. The wider the brown band, the milder the winter will be. Some towns hold annual woolly worm festivals in the fall, complete with caterpillar races and an official declaration of the woolly worm's prediction for that winter.

Are the woolly worm's bands really an accurate way to predict the winter weather? Dr. C.H. Curran, former curator of insects at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, tested the woolly worms' accuracy in the 1950's. His surveys found an 80% accuracy rate for the woolly worms' weather predictions.

Other researchers have not been able to replicate the success rate of Curran's caterpillars, though.

Today, entomologists agree that woolly worms are not accurate predictors of winter weather. Many variables may contribute to changes in the caterpillar's coloration, including larval stage, food availability, temperature or moisture during development, age, and even species. (about.com)

It's getting colder and rains a fair bit, so the cats spend a lot more time indoors, or laying in the sun on afternoons when it's not raining:

Sitting in the garden reading one chilly afternoon.  He was comfortable, but eventually my hands went numb and I had to go back inside.

Gracie laying on the garden path.

Jesse sleeps on my lap all day while I read, and then follows me around the fields meowing at me to pet him.  Which I do.

Right before I took this picture he was on the other side of a blackberry bramble yowling like a lost toddler because he couldn't find me, and I had to go get him.  Silly cat.  He's sitting in a catloaf next to me on the couch right now, huffing because I'm using the laptop and he can't sit on my lap.

The skies are brilliant blue and mostly clear, but I catch some interesting clouds occasionally.  It's overcast here, most of the year.

I was reading a passage from Mahmoud Darwish today, and thought it was fitting.  This was his last work; he knew he wouldn't live much longer.  I think it's his best.

This is your autumn, opening, spreading the strong scent of exile and empty letters. So fill them with the yellow, coffee-brown, gold, and copper – nonsynonymous colors – of leaves that take their time in bidding farewell to the tree because the wind is absent today. You are so lonesome you do not think of loneliness. Because you have not bid farewell to anyone since yesterday, you do not care if your shadow “walks before you or behind you.” The air is light and the earth seems solid. And this is not one of the attributes of exile, as they said.

This is your autumn, emerging from a hot summer, from a season of global fatigue, from a seemingly endless war. An autumn that ripens the forgotten grapes on high mountains. An autumn that prepares for grand gatherings where the assembly of old gods reviews drafts of fates still being written, hammering out a truce between summer and winter. But autumn in the east is short. It passes like a quick wave from one traveler on horseback to another, as they pass each other, going in opposite directions. No one can rely on such an autumn, on dust storms, or on a temporary marriage.

As for autumn here – the autumn of a Paris returning from its long vacation – nature, tempted by rain, devotes itself to writing its lush poems with all of its skill and with the help of aging wine. A long, long autumn, like a Catholic marriage contract that does not betray its joy or misery to someone like you, a bystander. A patient autumn. An erotic embrace of light and shadow, male and female, of a sky that descends respectfully over trees disrobing with dignity, before the confusion of temptations between raining drops of light and luminous drops of water. An autumn showing off. An autumn becoming one with the beginnings of three seasons: summer’s nudity, winter’s intercourse, and spring’s youth.

And you, you tread lightly on the surface of this autumn day. You are invigorated, infatuated, and stunned: “How can anyone die on a day like this?” You do not know whether you live in autumn or whether it lives in you, even if you remember that you are in the autumn of life, where mind and heart master listening to time with a harmonious collusion of pleasure and wisdom. A noble rhythm raises the body to sense what is missing, so it is filled all the more with the beauty of cloudlessness and cloudiness. It prepares itself, like a weather station, to observe the appropriate weather conditions for a passing conversation: “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? So why don’t we meet for coffee?” The aroma of coffee has doors that lead to another journey: to friendship, love, or loss without pain. Coffee moves from the metaphorical to the tangible.

A secret rhythm leads this experience to an absolute sense of departure; to the encounter between an autumn strolling through squares with the crowd, people and doves, and your own private autumn, your inner autumn. You wonder, as someone else has: Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us? Finding a response does not interest you as much as slowing down time. You do not want this autumn to end, just as you do not want the poem to grow to fullness and end. You do not want to reach winter. Let autumn be your private eternity.

—	Mahmoud Darwish, ‘In the Presence of Absence,’ Chapter X, translated by Sinan Antoon (2011).

also topped with yellow peaches

Some of this is a little inappropriate, but we could all use a laugh and it involves cats, an interesting woman from history, and a Japanese folktale.

So there are pictures circulating of Japanese internet sensation Shironeko and a cat friend doing...something with...something:

(Images from Shironeko's blog, in Japanese.  I also ran the post through Google Translate).

Those are real peaches; they're yellow peaches and they really are as big as they look.  I'm not the only one who thinks they look like butts:

(From the comments on the original blog post.  I took screenshots of the Google translation of the page).

About five other commenters said the same thing.  Butts!  Whomever took those photos does have really great photography "put skills" (I can't think how else to phrase that), and very cooperative cats.

Someone in the comments wrote a little story about the cats and their peaches, but I have no idea what's going on:

"Bugger also topped with yellow peaches."  Indeed.  Thank you, Google Translate.  I have no idea what word it's translating as "bugger"; it doesn't look like it's any better at translating Japanese into English than it is at translating Arabic into English.

Low-acid, fragile clingstone peaches are popular in Japan, different from the varieties popular in North America and the Middle East:

Momo (Peach)

Japanese peaches are generally larger, softer and more expensive than Western peaches, and their flesh is usually white rather than yellow. Peaches are commonly eaten raw after being peeled. Japanese peaches are in season during the summer.

Peaches were introduced from China as early as the Yayoi Period (300 BC- 300 AD). Peach production in the prefectures of Yamanashi and Fukushima make up the majority of the country's total output. The peach features prominently in the Japanese folklore tale of Momotaro (The Peach Boy), which is set in Okayama Prefecture.

(From Japan Guide)

A summary of the story of Momotaro, from Wikipedia:

According to the present form of the tale (dating to the Edo period), Momotarō came to Earth inside a giant peach, which was found floating down a river by an old, childless woman who was washing clothes there. The woman and her husband discovered the child when they tried to open the peach to eat it. The child explained that he had been sent by Heaven to be their son. The couple named him Momotarō, from momo (peach) and tarō (eldest son in the family).^[1]

Years later, Momotarō left his parents to fight a band of marauding oni (demons or ogres) on a distant island. En route, Momotarō met and befriended a talking dog, monkey, and pheasant, who agreed to help him in his quest. At the island, Momotarō and his animal friends penetrated the demons' fort and beat the band of demons into surrendering. Momotarō and his new friends returned home with the demons' plundered treasure and the demon chief as a captive. Momotarō and his family lived comfortably from then on.^[1]

The whole story is in The Japanese Fairy Book (1908), written by Iwaya Sazanami, illustrated by Kakuzo Fujiyama, and translated by Yei Theodora Ozaki.  It's not very long.

Momotaro emerging from the giant peach (illustration from The Japanese Fairy Book).

Wikipedia gives a little bit of information on Yei Theodora Ozaki's life, but it's all from an introduction to one of her books:

Yei Theodora Ozaki (英子セオドラ尾崎 Eiko Seodora Ozaki^?, 1871 – December 28, 1932) was an early 20th-century translator of Japanese short stories and fairy tales. Her translations were fairly liberal but have been popular, and were reprinted several times after her death.

According to "A Biographical Sketch" by Mrs. Hugh Fraser, included in the introductory material to Warriors of old Japan, and other stories, Ozaki came from an unusual background. She was the daughter of Baron Ozaki, one of the first Japanese men to study in the West, and Bathia Catherine Morrison, daughter of William Morrison, one of their teachers. Her parents separated after five years of marriage, and her mother retained custody of their three daughters until they became teenagers. At that time, Yei was sent to live in Japan with her father, which she enjoyed. Later she refused an arranged marriage, left her father's house, and became a teacher and secretary to earn money. Over the years, she traveled back and forth between Japan and Europe, as her employment and family duties took her, and lived in places as diverse as Italy and the drafty upper floor of a Buddhist temple.

All this time, her letters were frequently misdelivered to the unrelated Japanese politician Yukio Ozaki, and his to her. In 1904, they finally met, and soon married.

Cabinet des Fées has a very thorough article about Ms. Ozaki's life and environment and their influence on her work.  It mentions Ms. Ozaki's desire to change contemporary Western ideas of Japanese culture, and particularly of Japanese women as oppressed and passive:

Ms Ozaki’s biographer Mrs Fraser tells us that one of O-Yei’s motivations for writing was to dispel misconceptions of Japan that she found in the West, and to show the “good old ideals and sentiments”[6] of Japanese culture portrayed in the old stories. We are told that one of O-Yei’s particular concerns was the perception of Japanese women in the West. She wanted to put an end to the notion of the Japanese woman as an oppressed, passive Madame Butterfly figure. Mrs Fraser records her as saying: “When I was last in England and Europe… very mistaken notions about Japan and especially about its women existed generally. I determined if possible to write so as to dispel these wrong conceptions.”[7] In this way, she was very much a woman of her time. The Meiji Period (1868-1912) was a time of great social and political change in Japan, as the country was keen to show itself as equal to the Western powers. Women led the way in this as much as men; and O-Yei herself belonged to several educational, charitable and patriotic ladies’ societies. At the same time, things were changing for women in England too. The suffragettes were to riot in 1911 and the Women’s Institute was to be founded in 1915. As a well-connected, bi-cultural woman, Yei Theodora Ozaki stood in a good position to address these contemporary issues, at the same time as she looked back to the past for inspiration.

(Elizabeth Hopkinson, 'East Meets West: Yei Theodora Ozaki’s Japanese Fairy Tales,' May 2011)

Ozaki's Wikipedia page has links to online copies of her books; they're in the public domain.

 I couldn't find a whole lot of information on Japanese yellow peaches in English, but the Wall Street Journal has an article on Chinese water honey peaches, which are related:

Thai bananas are long-lived compared with China's honey peaches. Picked in the morning, the peaches are flown to Beijing or trucked to Shanghai in the afternoon; in many cases, they are selling in stores the same evening. On a recent Saturday afternoon in Yangshan's wholesale peach market, I asked a grower to find me a carton of peaches that I could take home with me to Bangkok on Monday. No peach in the market would last that long, he replied; I'd have to go with him to his orchard so he could pick me hard, green ones. He warned me that I'd be sacrificing some taste because they would be picked too early. By Tuesday, the green peaches I ended up taking home with me were so soft that I had to put them all in the refrigerator. They were still delicious.

Tang Haijun, a big honey peach grower and an industry spokesman, says another problem with Chinese peaches is that they are extraordinarily fragile. "They're so tender, if you press on one, in an hour there will be a black spot," he says. Over a lunch of local specialties (snails, pigs feet, pumpkin stems, his peaches for dessert), Mr. Tang explained that to keep away insects, he has every peach in his orchard individually wrapped with newspaper while it is ripening on the tree. All this special handling comes at a price: A honey peach sells for as much as $3 in a Shanghai or Beijing grocery store.

In the U.S., peach technology produces a very different product. "It's unfortunate that many of our peaches are bred to have superior shelf life and exterior color," says Karen Caplan, chief executive of Frieda's Inc., a Los Alamitos, Calif., high-end distributor of imported and domestic produce. "The growers don't focus on flavor. They refrigerate them in transit, put them on the shelf, and they go mealy." [...]

The best bet, then, is to eat honey peaches in China, and that's what I did with wild abandon, consuming 10 peaches, averaging half a pound each, in a single day in Yangshan. Under the tutelage of Mr. Tang, I learned that Chinese peach-eating is a very different process. First, you should gently massage the peach for several minutes, releasing the juice. When it starts feeling like a sponge, it's ready to be peeled; the skin slips off like a glove. Then you just pick it up whole and slurp away; cutting it would result in waste of the delicious juice. (The Best Peach on Earth, August 21, 2009)

 There is a bit more information on Japanese and Chinese (and other) peach cultivars and breeding programs in The Peach: Botany, Production, and Uses (Layne and Bassi, 2008, pg 168-9).  The ebook is over two hundred dollars, so hopefully nobody wants to read the redacted sections very badly.

Garden: August 03 2015

I walked into town this morning to go to the bank and pay bills (I haven't payed my healthcare premium in four months, oops), but it was closed.  It turns out it's BC Day, a statutory holiday.  But I got a few things at the grocery store, and I took a few pictures along the way.

Angel wing begonias outside the grocery store.

Fuschias outside the grocery store.

 I believe that's Fuschia triphylla 'Gartenmeister Bonstedt,' which is bushy and upright but is not hardy.  Carl Bonstedt of the Gottingen Botanical Gardens in Germany introduced it along with a bunch of other cultivars in 1904-1905, and it's still very popular. (American Fuschia Society)

Above, some flowers growing along the side of the road.  On the left is rudbeckia, and I think the one on the right might be purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), which is listed as a noxious weed in BC.

The blackberries are coming along.  I ate a bunch and they're actually sweet now.  Himalayan blackberry is also a noxious weed, but at least it produces something edible.

I was surprised when I came back, after nearly fifteen years away, and the gardens were gone and a thriving thicket of Himalayan blackberry and strapping alder trees in their place.  There's blackberry and morning glory up to the eaves, and in some places you can't see out the windows at all.  I've been back a few times over the years, but if I've looked at the gardens in that time I don't remember it.  It's like being in Sleeping Beauty's castle.

Our house is at the bottom of a hill just after the bend of a sharp corner.  There's a concrete barrier along most of the front yard, but there's a 15ft gap in it at the bend.  There's also a straight clear path between the road the the front right corner of the house.  It's perfectly placed for drunks who lose control on the corner to shoot through the front yard and hit the house, which happens frequently.  There used to be fruit trees between the road and the house, and there still are some around the side of the house, but over the years the drunk drivers have cleared a path to the house.

My brother was telling me that last time a drunk hit the house, he was too plastered to find his way out of the yard.  He drove all over the front lawn hitting trees and the concrete barrier.  There is another gap in the barrier next to the driveway that a vehicle can fit through, but it was dark and he was too drunk to find it.  While he's driving around, my brother calls the cops and gives a description of the truck and the driver, and then the guy gets out of the truck and staggers around, so my brother locks all the doors from the inside.  A while later, he saw flashing lights and went outside to meet the cops, and the door slammed and locked behind him, and he didn't have his keys or his wallet on him.

The cops saw a truck abandoned on the lawn and a tall youngish man standing in the yard looking at him, and they decided he was their suspect and would not listen when he said he lived there and he wasn't drunk and he didn't even have a driver's license.  They unzipped his hoodie, and he was wearing a red t-shirt underneath.  He had said the driver was wearing a red shirt, so that sealed it.  They arrested him and put him in the back of the police car while they went to investigate the truck.

Luckily our uncle came by from next door to see what the flashing lights were about, and saw my brother in the back of the cruiser.  The cops believed my uncle that my brother lived there and didn't drive, and they didn't charge him with anything.  I assume they found the driver eventually, since he was catastrophically drunk and had left his truck behind.  All that's left now is a huge dent in the siding on the front right corner of the house.

I'm almost certain I grew this cactus from seed in the sixth grade.  It's survived somehow, although it's barely been watered since my grandmother died eight years ago.

Sweet Cicely seedheads against the summer sky.

You can almost watch the zucchini plants grow.  That little zucchini wasn't there before the weekend, but it's already 4" long.

A rose mallow (Malva sylvestris 'zebrina') growing out of a crack in a concrete path.

Here's a bigger mallow plant growing in Russia.

It's a very old plant and an easy one to grow, technically a short-lived perennial, but ours only live a year.  They reseed themselves and grow back the next year without an any effort or attention.  They have a long flowering season, don't need a lot of water, and aren't invasive.  A good-sized bush will be about three feet tall and two wide.  My grandmother used to grow them, but the only ones left are growing in cracks in the pavement and not in the garden beds. 

Our cats: left, Gracie; right, Jesse.

Shortly after I took this picture, Gracie jumped off the couch and caught one of her claws in the afghan on the way down.  I was reading something and it took me a few moments to realise that she was flailing around on the floor in a panic.  Her paw was still stuck to the afghan sitting on the couch cushion.  I yanked the afghan off the couch and dropped it on the floor.  She freed herself and ran off.

Jesse used to only sit on my lap when he really wanted attention and I wasn't giving him any.  He would sit on my lap and lick my hand while I tried to type on my phone, until I stopped and pet him.  Then he would get off my lap and curl up against me on the couch.  Except last weekend, he curled up on my lap and wouldn't get off.  I moved him and got up and later sat back down again with my laptop on my lap, and he stood next to me on the couch and yowled at me until I put the laptop on the table and let him back on my lap.  And then I was stuck reading on my phone, because I couldn't have both the cat and the computer on my lap at once, and I couldn't reach the coffee table from the couch.

He was really clingy, and I thought maybe he was sick, but he was eating fine and behaving normally, just sitting on me a lot.  But this is the cat who wouldn't even come near me for four months, and then started wandering into my kitchen and demanding to be fed.  I think he just levelled up in trust again.  He's not on my lap all of the time anymore, he's beside me right now, but he still sleeps on me a lot.  I guess that's normal for cats, I'm just not used to it.

Gracie is a stubborn cat

Our tabby cat Gracie sees me hold up my phone to take a picture of her and turns her head, every time. Not just a little bit, as far as it goes so I can't get a picture that isn't terrible. I swear she knows what she's doing. I posted a picture of her doing it on Instagram today, but that's only funny once.

So my Instagram is almost entirely pics of Jesse (and flowers, I photograph a lot of flowers), except on the rare occasion where I catch Gracie sleeping. But she clearly doesn't want her picture taken (do cats even understand what photos are though?), so I haven't been photographing her recently. People were starting to wonder what happened to her. Nothing, she's just stubborn.

Let me tell you about our cats

We have a female tabby cat named Gracie and a male black cat named Jesse. They're both around sixteen years old. They're both barn cats, but they're in the house a lot too.

Gracie isn't shy, but she doesn't usually like to be touched. Sometimes she does like to be touched, but there's no way to know which one it is this time unless you try. I don't usually try unless she's rubbing against my legs. I let her make contact first. Usually though, she just comes in and eats and leaves again. That's fine. That's how she is.

Jesse is very shy and very skittish. I lived here for months before he would even come near me. He's always out running around in the fields, but he's also skinny and he's always hungry. I used to leave kibble for him under the porch. When the weather got warmer, I started leaving the side door open to get some fresh air and he started coming inside the house to eat. He comes in and noisily chows down at least three times a day, and he's eating upstairs with my brother too. He's probably only thin because he runs constantly.

When Jesse finishes eating, he stands on the other side of the room from me and yowls at me to come pet him. If I'm busy, he will come closer, and I'll stick my hand out, but he won't come within reach, even if he's only an inch from the ends of my fingers. I don't know what that cat's deal is, but I always have to get up to pet him. And I usually do. My brother doesn't, but he says Jesse's been doing that forever and nobody knows why. He's unlikely to stop now.

My mom tells me not to let the cat train me, but I don't mind. Life is short and his life will be much shorter. He’s already sixteen. He won’t be around forever. I don’t mind getting up a few times a day to pet him and make him happy.

He's extremely affectionate and can't get enough attention, now that he trusts me. During the day, he will sit on the couch for a while, drooling and kneading and purring like an outboard motor while I pet him, and then go back out again for a while. He comes back in in the early evening and spends all evening and night sleeping on the couch beside me, snoring softly. I stay up all night while the whole house is asleep, so it's nice to have company, even if he's asleep too.

Soğukçeşme Street

Soğukçeşme Sokaği ('Street of the Cold Fountain') is a lovely cobblestoned street squeezed in between the Hagia Sophia and the wall of Gülhane Park, part of the Topkapı Palace grounds. Its late 19th century wooden townhouses were restored or rebuilt in the 1980s; most of them are now run as expensive hostels. One house contains a library full of books about Istanbul.

An Ottoman water tap.

There are an art gallery and some fancy cafes, towards the end of the street.

Men carrying large trays of things through crowds are a common sight in Istanbul, but it was not crowded today.

Looking back up the street from the end:

Street art outside an art gallery:

It was the middle of a weekday in the off-season, so this cat had the cafe to itself.

A stream in shady Gülhane Park:

Gülhane Park is very popular with couples, young families, and tourists. Girls in hijab and their boyfriends are often seen kissing among the trees - maybe they think people can't see them, or they just don't care if anyone does, I don't know which.

There are birdhouses way, way up in the trees. I don't know what sort of birds they house, but they look tropical. They were too high up to get a good picture.

Begonias planted at the feet of the trees.