Sunday-Friday, 9-14 DEC 2012
This post is being written in Adelaide on 29 DEC in a probably futile attempt to catch up somewhat.
We had a lovely week at a resort out on the Mornington Peninsula, southeast around the large bay that has Melbourne at its head.
On two separate days we visited the two branches of the Melbourne Royal Botanic Garden. First we went to the smaller branch in Cranbourne, which is just east northeast of the town of Frankston shown on the map above. Cranbourne is (almost) exclusively for native Australian plants. There are a few adventitious invasive weeds here and there that were spotted by our keenly observant family botanist.
Here, in no particular order, are some highlights (in Tyler's opinion) of both gardens. Paula is the botanist. I just shoot the purty flowers that I like, without paying much attention to their names.
The two photos above are panorama composites. I've taken a real liking to a Mac app called PanoEdit which does a fantastic job of automatically identifying areas of overlap and pasting multiple photos together to make these panoramas. For your information, the resulting panorama of the lake above, before compression for this blog post, was of resolution 6382 x 3093 pixels. The JPEG file size is 4.7 MB. The one above it of the red clay garden is 11,729 x 3090 pixels and JPEG file size of 8.2 MB. It encompasses a view of almost 180° taken as a series of 12 Megapixel 4x3 aspect ratio (4000x3000 pixels) photos.
Ask Paula what this is. I just liked the purty purple berries.
This is a possum family that resides in the window of the garden cafe:
This is the entrance to the main branch in Melbourne. It is an enormous garden. I didn't remember how big it was from our previous visit in March 2010. That visit came just a couple of weeks after Melbourne had hit by a devastating hailstorm that had broken all the glass in the greenhouses and knocked the leaves off many of the trees. I didn't notice any remaining signs of the damage.
It is just across the road from the ANZAC memorial.
Finally, a word about preachy signs from the religion of Environmentalism. Such signs abound in every botanical garden, museum, and other public educational venue throughout our western civilization extolling the virtue of the rainforest or decrying the sinfulness of hormone-fed cattle. Here is just one example:
I am NOT an anti-environmentalist. I was raised as a good Boy Scout with a love for hiking, camping, and the marvels of nature. But I do find tedious (and, frankly, dangerous) the implications and uncritical promotion of primitive indigenous herbal medicine and superstitious witch-doctor practices that I have seen showcased in the aboriginal culture displays of several museums here. Fact is that, in contrast to our modern FDA-regulated synthetic pharmaceuticals, few of the primitive remedies pandered by the medicine men have been scientifically shown to be any more than marginally effective, if at all. There are exceptions, of course, and yes, many of our modern drugs rely on natural precursors for their molecular framework, but they have been made as effective as they are by chemical derivativization and extensive research. The effectiveness of primitive medicine men relied mostly on the synergy of their incantations with the placebo effect, which, after all, has been repeatedly shown to be 20-30% effective for many ailments.
Posted from Tyler's iPad
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