Gardens at Vila Porto Mare, Madeira

 A magnificent banana plant near the entrance

I love flowers, seeing new varieties, growing them myself and  painting them.

In January I joined a garden tour led by Cindy at Vila Porto Mare in Madeira. I had visited and admired the garden before but was amazed to learn more about the diversity of plants growing there.

We were told that there are 45 varieties of palm trees there, more than at the Botanical gardens.
The veteran Washington palms look as it they are trying to get taller than everything else.

The land was once a banana plantation and there are still lots of banana plants in the garden. Part way round we were given a silver banana to eat. These are small, sweet and delicious and grow on a much taller plant.
I saw papayas, starfruits, tiny pomegranates and sugar cane as well as vines.
We were all given some seeds to take home and I was given a cutting from a sweet potato plant. Sweet potatoes are grown a lot in Madeira and added to bread. The flesh is usually a white colour.
Thanks Cindy for a most enjoyable visit.

At the garden of Vila Porto Mare one can find 106 families, 355 genera, 460 species and 555taxa (species, subspecies and cultivars), numbers that place it in the EXCEPTIONAL CLASS OF TAXONOMIC RICHNESS.
for more about the garden click here

A Monarch butterfly feeding on a native Madeira plant Bloodflower (Asclepias curassavica)

a beautiful poem amid the plants in a border

                               Clerodendro flaming glory flower

                                               Hibiscus

Sugar cane

Papaya

Starfruit

A scented lantana, I hadn't realised till I looked at the label that it is a verbena

The following photos of orchids from the orchid garden are from a previous visit. Some of the orchids that have been decorating the hotels are brought here to flower again.

Click here to see a video about the garden

Lights at RHS Wisley

 Giant sculptural flower lights in groups around the RHS gardens at Wisley

'Christmas Glow' was opened by Mary Berry on Dec 3rd and continues until Jan 3rd.

The lights came on at about 4pm and by 4.30pm it was getting dark and the glow of the flowers became more apparent. Some trees and shrubs were lit. One of the groups of giant flowers was interactive and popular with kids of all ages. Pressing buttons made the lights change colour.

These flowers looked quite different when it got darker. I liked them both ways.

a glorious sunset seen from the glasshouse

Inside the glasshouse a giant Christmas tree made of poinsettias in front of the waterfall.

                                         and another made from succulents.

                                

                                Time for home.

After The Rain, Coombe Woods

Prairie planting at Coombe Woods.

I have been following a blog called Little Arty Journeys. It is written by Angela, a friend from some years ago. We had lost touch and recently reconnected through Facebook which is how I found her blog. Angela describes her walks through the gardens at Coombe Woods near Croydon, sharing beautiful creative photos in such a way that I feel I have been with her. Through her camera she often focuses on close ups of small details and patterns in nature that could so easily be missed.
 I was delighted when she invited me to meet her at the garden one day.

 To see Angela's blog   click here

'Art is not what you see but what you make others see' Edgar Degas

We arrived after some heavy rain. Tiny raindrops sparkled delicately suspended from grasses and leaves like tiny jewels.

A flash of sunlight illuminated these leaves and made the rows of raindrops sparkle making them like
chandelier ear rings.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour' 
William Blake

Beauty berries or Callicarpa, berried treasure like highly polished opaque glass beads

The sun came out for the banana flower

A border of dahlias

The gardener busy at work. He does a wonderful job and this the only gardener here.

On the path back to the car park there was a splendid finale of apricot and peach  begonias.
The cafe produced a superb cup of coffee and we had a long chat and catch up.

PS Thank you Angela, I so enjoyed sharing a little arty journey with you and seeing things through your eyes that I might otherwise have missed. I thought the spindle berries were beautiful., my photos of them were out of focus but I can enjoy yours instead.

The Rising Tide

The Rising Tide by British Sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor  was commissioned for the Totally Thames Festival  and installed on the foreshore of the River Thames near Vauxhall Bridge during September 2015

 I was there for over two hours and saw quite a change in that time. At the bottom of this post I have put a link to a you tube video that shows a time lapse from low to high tide, both beautiful and thought provoking,

The beautiful white shire horses and their riders were moulded from life except for the horses heads which are based on the heads of an oilhead pump, known as a 'nodding donkey' They are made from white marine concrete reinforced with steel to make them strong enough to withstand the tides.

As the tide rises twice a day the horses disappear under the water till only the heads of the riders can be seen.

They are a modern day version of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The two suited figures sit on horses that have their heads down grazing for oil. The figures represent politicians or business people and have their eyes shut oblivious to the rising tide.
Two children represent the future.

It was good to see them when the tide was low, to be able to view them from different angles and watch as the water rose. It was also interesting to see other people's engagement and responses. Some people were doing time lapse photography, some stood and pondered, some were posing for photos next to the horses, people were photographing from all sorts of angles. One man had his tripod in the water, another removed bits of rubbish from the water's edge and lay flat on his front to take photos. Others mudlarked, collected things like broken pottery from the shore. The Duck Bus took to the water right next to us and someone lost a boot in a patch of perilous muddy quicksand.

I enjoyed watching the changing shadows and the relationships of the shapes of the figures against the different backdrops.

The two children sit on horses that have stopped grazing.

I liked the details especially all the different shoes

 “The suited figures are ambivalent to their situation – I wanted to create this striking image of a politician in front of the Houses of Parliament, ignoring the world as the water rises around him. And they are sitting on horses that are grazing, taking as much as they can from the ground.” Taylor

For a time lapse youtube video that shows the full extent of the rising tide click here