If you think your garden has some challenges with slope, consider this picture. This is quite a typical Rwandan farm. I put it at about 45 degrees.
The photo below is another view — rather hazy, I’m afraid — of the most common Rwandan landscape type, a patchwork of small farms on a hillside. This is in the northwest, in Rubavu District.
Why all those people are walking down the road will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.
Washington, D.C., has been enjoying a few days with temperatures only in the mid 80’s and the humidity just below 50%.
For us, this is good. Our summer days usually begin with humidity at more than 80%. There’s an old story that, until air conditioning, the British government considered Washington a tropical hardship post and authorized its diplomats to wear Burmuda shorts. This is probably a myth, but everyone here finds it entirely plausible.
So to take full advantage of the current break, in the last few evenings we have looked for restaurants with outside tables. We chose two with very different patios: The Tabard Inn, with red brick, lush green vines, sculptures, and antique urns; and Two Amys, minimalist in comparison, but projecting some Italian chic with its yellow brick, modern red-orange chairs, and pretty glassware.
I’ll enjoy looking at these pictures again at mid-week, when the temperatures are predicted to be back up near 100°.
Click on any thumbnail in the gallery to enlarge.
I’m stuck inside with a cold today and have been all weekend, so I haven’t been able to take any new pictures.
However, I found these photos of Tanner Springs Park in Portland, Oregon, which I took in 2008. I thought I would share them because I was thinking about Fiona Stephenson’s chalk stream show garden and about how a landscape type (in this case, wetlands) can be interpreted effectively in a garden design (in this case, a .92 acre urban public park).
Also, the children in the photos are having such a nice time fooling around in the grass and water, and, while I look at them, I reflect that it’s going to be 95° here in Washington, D.C., today and only 70° in Portland.
The Tanner Springs Park opened in 2006 in the Pearl District, which is a neighborhood partly made up of old warehouses that are now turned into apartments and shops. Before the warehouses, there was Tanner Creek, which fed streams, wetlands, and a lake and ended at the Willamette River close by. In the late 19th century, Tanner Creek was rerouted into an underground system of pipes.
The park is not a restoration of the original environment but is meant to imitate and function somewhat like a wetland.
The concept for the park was provided by Peter Walker & Partners. The design was by Atelier Dreiseitl and Green Works, P.C.
Click the link for an article about the park by George Hazelrigg in the April 2006 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Click on any thumbnail in the gallery below to scroll through all the enlarged photos.
Addendum: For more recent (May 2011) photos of the park, check out the blog Metropolitan Gardens.
enclos*ure 