This week, our travel-pic theme is X for Xerox – black-and-white reproductions of some pics we’ve taken around the world. For Tuesday, a flower we photographed in Oxford raises a reflection on Shakespeare’s famous line about “A rose, by any other name…” When he wrote that line in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare was having young…
This week, our Travel pics series has been G for Gardens. The final image in the series comes from London. St James’ Park is one of eight ‘Royal Parks’ in London, and stretches from Buckingham Palace to The Mall and The Horse Guards. It has a lake, islands, waterfowl, and flowers aplenty – bed after bed…
This week, our Travel pics series is G for Gardens. For Saturday, it’s Singapore, and the city-state’s National Orchid Gardens.. We recently had reason to spend a few days in Singapore, on our way to Vietnam, and discovered a great little bonus that is sometimes on offer if you fly with Singapore Airlines – the Singapore…
This week, our Travel pics series is G for Gardens. And here’s the thing about gardens. They don’t have to be big, formal, organised gardens like some we’ve featured this week. And they don’t have to be commercially productive, or a big tourist attraction, or functional in any way. Some gardens, of course, are tiny –…
This week, our Travel pics series is G for Gardens. Here in Australia, as in the US and other industrialised nations, agriculture has been industrialised – we have massive combine harvesters and air-conditioned tractors and giant insect-like cane cutters, and tea-picking machines that replace dozens of workers, and … well, you get the idea. While there…
This week, our Travel pics series is G for Gardens. Funchal, on the island of Madeira, is justifiably known for its flowers – whether in a formal botanical garden like these or in roadside beds beside the route of the annual Flower Festival. Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal, about 800km west of Morocco, and…
This week, our Travel pics series is G for Gardens. Today’s pic is actually a triptych of images we took at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco. The Conservatory is a botanical garden and greenhouse in Golden Gate Park, the park that stretches for 5km from the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood to the sea. The park is…
This week, our Travel pics series is G for Gardens. Some people have a green thumb. In fact, my grandfather was once reputed to have stuck a dead, dry stick in the ground – and have it grow. Me, I’m the opposite. If I plant something, it’s almost guaranteed to die. Although I suspect that’s partly because…
The theme for our travel pics this week is F, for Flowers. I’ve always called the plants Daisies – but that just goes to show how little I know. They are, in fact, Asters, growing in the bright winter sun of New Zealand. Beside the Wintergarden in Auckland that I spoke of, we also…
The theme for our travel pics this week is F, for Flowers. Today’s pic is of the Tacca Chantrieri, or Black Bat flower. They apparently grow well in Australia, and I have seen one in a botanical gardens in Cairns, but this one I spotted in the San Francisco Flower Conservatory, in Golden Gate…
Cairns Communications 