Art

“Cosmic Cacti”

ESPatch Aug 26, 2017 1 comment

Our third Bollywood installment also comes from Ram-Leela:

So much has happened since I last posted…

Cosmic solar eclipses, a hurricane, a trip to Canada,

Kosmik Kactus?

Wait, What…No?

“Aye, it’s no right at a’ ESPatch!”

This has gotten out of hand.

I find this obsession with tinkering and making cacti more colorful somewhat disturbing?

Why are they not picking on the succulents in the background?

Oh wait…

As if sticking in fake flowers was not enough, Kosmik Kactus have resorted to just blasting their poor plants with rather bright coloring…just to jazz up the apparently REALLY boring and natural GREEN color of the plant.

“Boldly going where no plant has gone before…”?

Borg Queen: Cacti! We used to be exactly like them. Flawed. Weak. Organic…green. But we evolved to include the synthetic…fake little flowers, spray paint. Now we use both to attain perfection to sell in the box stores. Your goal should be the same as ours.

Okay that was a stretch, moving quickly along to a recent trip to Canada…

Yes the Levwolds were once again taking to the air,

this time headed to Montreal for to compete in the North American Pipe Band Championships in Maxville with

The Silver Thistle Pipes and Drums.

At cruising altitude the window frost resembled Celestial cartography.

Coming in to land.

Time to unpack, hang up the kilt and have a quick ‘dab’ in our hotel room.

Of course I called it a ‘dub’ and got laughed at then reprimanded for apparently doing it completely wrong.

We were hoping to escape to some cooler temperatures in Montreal but unfortunately for us they were in a heatwave, of course they were.

It was hot, really hot and like Europe, not many places had A/C, fans, well, anything really.

I almost lost my mind in a store in China Town.

Hmm, okay?

Sweat was running down my nose, the air was completely still, a sweltering combination of Peking duck and raw sewage hung heavy in the air.

I felt some involuntary head movements coming on, a sure sign my tourist tolerance valve was rattling and about to blow.

Everywhere I looked was shelf after shelf of tourist tat, umbrellas that, we were told, could never blow inside out (naturally we bought 3), chopsticks, fans, jade elephants, you get the idea…I mopped my brow, eye twitching.

I finally cracked at the excruciating duration of time it was taking to pick out some Squishies and a wooden Samurai Sword.

This was an interesting find (well, for me) on a busy street in Old Montreal.

I will forever wonder if the celosia had been growing in there or if someone had dumped it in there?

He found lots of opportunities to cool down on our excursions.

One of our journeys took us to the historic district of old Montreal, to the Notre-Dame Basilica.

The church was built in the gothic revival style,

and is insanely ornate and colorful on the inside.

We passed a lot of street art installations.

This one strangely reminded me of when I used to try to protect my citrus trees from frost.

Ridiculous.

http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2010/01/carnival/

These rotating seats were an instant hit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts:

And then there was the food.

Some traditional,

some extravagant,

and some rather challenging, well, for some people.

Escargot kids!…Dig in!

Let’s take a closer look at that middle one.

The sheer distress.

Moving along…

We headed out of a now rather blustery and wet Montreal for the hour and a half drive to Maxville to compete with another 50 or so bands in the Glengarry Highland Games.

Here is our MSR (March, Strathspey and Reel) performance.

The rain and wind really picked up at the end of the closing ceremonies making surprisingly short work of the umbrella that could not be blown inside out by quickly blowing it inside out.

Time for one last trip, this time to the Montreal botanical Garden.

Exiting the metro we had a great view of the Olympic Park. an impressive structure that would not look out of place in a Star Wars movie.

It was massive!

An elevator runs up the spine.

Entrance to the Montreal botanical Garden

Entrance to the Gardens.

Impressive sedum,

coneflowers,

lots and lots of coneflowers.

The grounds were extensive (about 190 acres of thematic gardens and greenhouses), you could spend days in here.

The grounds are also home to the Montreal Insectarium.

So many specimens.

But by far the strangest critter I encountered was this odd looking chap:

I mean,

really?

All the walking found us a little peckish…

It had a very progressive menu, but after the escargot adventure nobody seemed too keen.

Stay Tuned For:

“Gossiping Wheelbarrows”

All material © 2017 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

“The Magic Carpet”

ESPatch May 3, 2017 3 comments

I encourage you to switch this video to full screen – it is visually stunning cinematography featuring Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh.

We are all big fans of Bollywood movies in the Patch.

In fact, keeping with the tradition and success of the Ancient Mariner series that I ran some years back (haha), I will share some of our favorite songs with you over the next series of posts.

That should take us well into 2020 based on the sporadicity of my recent postings and how many Bollywood songs we like!

Painting By Viktor Vasnetsov

Of course the magic carpet I am referring to in the title of this post is significantly less exotic and it certainly cannot fly of its own accord, (unless thrown in a wayward manner by a shovel).

It has nothing to do with King Solomon, teleportation or India.

I am of course referring to rather large quantities (in my case 30 yards to be exact) of decomposed granite.

Delivered in rather large trucks.

To think I used to buy this aggregate in small bags from Home Depot.

Ah, those were the days.

“Watch out for the cables…watch out for the cables!”

“Back wheels coming off the ground!”

A few days later the DG carpet was laid,

and some colorful furniture had moved in.

My buying decision when it comes down to purchasing garden furniture is sadly based solely around excrement.

Due to the location of our family backyard hangout, under this large Post Oak,

there is an abundance of the nasty stuff – ah the price you pay for shade.

This generally negates purchasing anything too expensive with say a nice deep wood-grain or refined finish, because well, it will be literally be covered before you can say: “that’s a really nice garden chair, where did you purcha…oh dear, I am afraid that dove has just jettisoned an alien all over it.”

“Ash…we have a problem.”

No, for me it is about the greasiness of the releasing agents in the plastic of the furniture – the texture on the plastic – how easy will it be to blast and dislodge a particularly stubborn ‘King Richard the 3rd’ with a hose?

Another carpet was also laid in the front yard, this time in the form of Tejas Black gravel:

I got so tired of this manhole cover getting covered I finally did something about it.

“Aye, he’s gaan naiwhere!”

Tejas Black generates some great shadows and looks even better when wet.

Also with a few introduced berms it tends not to look so contemporary, a thick layer discourages weeds.

I like to plant plants that can be pruned up / trunking specimens, that way if weeds do blow in…and they will, they are very visible and can be easily and cleanly treated.

Moving along…

We had a surprise this morning before school.

Upon exiting the back door there was clawing and a few snorts coming from this mountain laurel.

A pair of young raccoons were trying desperately to get some sleep.

They stayed on top of the mountain laurel until the sun came over the top of the house, forcing them to move on

…just stay out of my attic, ok?

To finish…

I am always shocked after revisiting an install as to how much time must have elapsed for things to have grown to the size they are.

It just never seems that long for me.

Here is where this north Austin installation started:

I remember it as if it were a couple maybe three years ago – not 5…

…hoping these baby cypresses would make it, they seemed so distant from each other as saplings.

A new water feature. The fresh plantings were so small – you can barely see the vitex tree (in the lawn in front of the shed door).

Then with a little help from time and some solid pruning by the client on the vitex, the scene had transformed:

The space felt very peaceful, the cypresses were now rubbing shoulders with one another and most surprising to me – it did not feel like Austin.

Visually it looks and feels like it could be in a cooler climate, somewhere much further north…

of course it was a cool rainy day when I visited.

I love the new suburban ‘cabin in the woods’ look to the garden shed.