Mother's Day

In Portugal, a Catholic country, Mother's Day used to be celebrated on the 8th of December, when we celebrate Our Lady of Conception. Then someone decided to change it to the first Sunday in May but some countries celebrate Mother's Day today.

My mother loved flowers so I always knew what to get her on her birthday or Mother's Day - another flowering plant for the garden.

Today I am remembering her by sharing photos of some of the plants she enjoyed over the years.

One of the first - a red camellia japonica

Santa Terezinha roses

My mother loved these and she adored her large red roses, but I don't have a photo of them.

It took a while to find this Viburnum opulus 'Sterile' for her, but I finally managed it.

 

I wish she could see how the magnolia liliiflora has grown!

Happy Mother's Day!

This is a Sunday Post, so visit Jake's for more interpretations on the theme.

Arrangement

Simple geometrical arrangement

Birds and flowers arrangement

Elaborate arrangement with sea creatures as the theme

Typical houses and trees arrangement

All this artwork on ceramic tiles was made by young students at an Algarve school (with expert guidance from their teacher, of course). 

I hope you like my selection of arrangements. For more, visit Jake's.

Plains

This is the theme for Jake's most recent Sunday Post challenge.

Flat lands have been rather neglected by me and my camera because I have, until now, found hills and mountains more appealing. However, I live on the coastal plains of southern Portugal, so I went out and took some new shots this week. Citrus trees, carob trees, olive trees and almond trees do well here. 

Oranges and lemons ...

Fertile lands between Silves and Messines

Grazing - there is a flock of sheep just visible in the distance

Almonds trees in a line

Never-ending expanses of grazing land can be found further north in the Alentejo region. On one of my future car trips to the north I must get off the motorway and take more photos of this beautiful landscape.

Cattle grazing in the vast fields of the Alentejo

To find plains from other parts of the world, visit Jake's.

Cee's Fun Foto challenge: Wood

Wood/Spring: Wind, Moisture, Air, Minerals, Ink, Mind, Rubber, Paper, Plants, Poison, Wax, Dissolve, Carbon, Clouds, Health, Space... all part of the challenge this week.

Well, I've been hibernating for a whole week now, so I had a look at my stash of photos and came up with these shots:

Boardwalk to Salgados beach and spring flowers on the dunes.

I wonder what the original tree looked like.

Same tree trunk/stump, different angle, different month.

Boardwalk at Alvor beach under a a pale-blue sky full of fluffy clouds.

You will find many more interpretations at Cee's.

Thank you for stopping by!


9th November 2013 - updated Cee's link.

Cee's Fun Foto Challenge: 2012 people, animals, outdoors and nature

I am joining Cee's challenge for the first time and starting off with a combination post:

People and Animals

Walking back and forth all day in the summer months, selling his wares cannot be easy, yet he always has a smile for anyone he meets along the way.

Locals at the monthly market in Algoz - shopping and catching up on the gossip.

This guy had the good sense to choose a sitting position!

I have used this photo of a participant in the street animation at a medieval fair before on a post for Jake's Sunday post challenge.

I can't resist introducing my 4 dogs. There are quite a few posts about them on my blog. Here are 2 in the garden.

Here are my other 2 on an outing to the beach.

Outdoors and Nature

A carob tree, common in the Algarve landscape.

An almond tree in bloom, also common in the Algarve in January/February.

A cloudy morning at the Aveiro lagoon.

Click on the image below to visit Cee and learn more about her challenge.

Cee's new blog url updated on 9th November 2013.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - December 2012

Christmas is just around the corner!

A student gave me this beautiful poinsettia ('Estrela de Natal' in Portuguese).

In the Algarve we've had a lot of rain over the past month and the temperatures are still allowing things to grow, so the garden got out of control. I usually cut the grass myself but when I had free time it was raining and when I didn't, which has been most of the time, grass and weeds just kept on growing!

So I had to make a choice - either I called in a professional gardener or the overgrowth would make me miserable. The gardener came and did a lot of cutting, pruning and clearing. This is the result - looking a bit bare now!

 

But the aloe arborescens flower is about to open.

There are lots of oranges and tangerines (my lemon bush hasn't been very productive, though).

Only three small lemons on my lemon bush at the back (the grasshoppers had a go at it before I terminated their stay).

My orange tree dominates the front garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the back there's a tangerine bush and some bright red geranium blooms.

A pink geranium.

This is really the last of the bougainvillea blooms.

Here is the path to the back patio:

Creeper, strawberry plants and other potted plants.

Flowers of the creeper above.

I love this creeper (anyone know what it's called?) because it doesn't lose its leaves in winter and it flowers all year round.

  The lavenders are still flowering.

I've taken some cuttings and hope to have some reasonably sized plants to give to friends in the spring.

If the snails don't get them first, I hope to have some yellow and red orchids next month. This is what I love about gardening - there is always something to look forward to!

Cuphea, santolina, lantana (leaves turned purple) in a planter and some orchids in pots.

Thank you to Carol for hosting Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day at May Dream Gardens.

Natural Resources

Alentejo landscape on a wintery day

In Portugal, the cork oak is part of the landscape in the Alentejo region. From the outer bark of this tree come the cork stoppers we find in every good bottle of wine.

In this photo, you can see where the outer bark has been removed.

Photo by Joergsam (Wikipedia), available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

And here you can see a ceramic tile panel depicting workers removing that bark.

Portugal produces around 50% of the cork harvested annually worldwide, with Corticeira Amorim being the leading company in the industry, transforming the outer bark of the cork oak into cork stoppers and many, many other products.

This is my entry for Jake's Sunday Post challenge. Check out Jacksprinter to find links to other posts on this theme.

Wonderful

Jake is back (Yay!) and he has suggested the theme wonderful for today's Sunday post.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, wonderful is an adjective that means "inspiring delight, pleasure, or admiration; extremely good; marvellous".

 

Well, when I was a child growing up in a suburb of Harare, my parents would take me to the largest park in the centre of the city. (I can't remember what it was called then; now it is called Harare Gardens). I was small, it was enormous and full of beautiful flowers and trees. It inspired in me delight, pleasure and admiration!

 

We used to visit the Garden before the Monomatapa Hotel was built

 

Unfortunately they never took me to Victoria Falls! Much later, when I visited Zimbabwe in 1985 I was hoping to have the chance of finally going there but my godfather said it wasn't safe, so I didn't go. All the pictures I've seen convince me that those Falls are absolutely wonderful!

 

Don't forget to visit Jake's blog for links to other entries.

Autumn

Autumn is the theme for Jake's Sunday post challenge. Although it's mid-September and I live in the northern hemisphere, in the Algarve people are still enjoying magnificent beach weather. The only sign that autumn is on its way is that the sun is setting earlier.

The photos I found for this post were taken about fifteen years ago at the beginning of September when I visited Celorico de Basto in northern Portugal.

Now it's time to visit all the other blogs that have joined Jake's challenge. Won't you come along, too?

Sunrise

Well, dear readers and fellow bloggers doing this week's Sunday post challenge - Sunrise - set by Jake, I didn't get up to see the sunrise today (actually, I can't remember the last time I was up at sunrise), so I'm going to use photos from the web.

The first free photos I found had these trees, which I love, so I looked no further. Thank you to the author, Jon Sullivan, who put these on http://www.public-domain-photos.com/.  

Trees at sunrise

Here comes the sun!

About 5 years ago I wanted to learn how to paint. However, my erratic work timetables keep preventing me from enrolling in actual classes, so sometimes I just study other people's paintings and play around with paint brushes and acrylic paints. While on the self-study route I discovered a site that I love - www.dailypainters.com/, so if you'd like to see some beautiful sunrise paintings, have a look there.

To see many more interpretations of this week's theme, hop on the birds below.

Fly to Jake's blog

 

 

B is for Baobab

Baobab tree in Bulawayo, photo by ironmanixs (Richard IJzermans), on flickr,
available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Have I told you I love trees? Oh, yes, I wrote that on my profile.

The Baobab is a truly magnificent tree! It's shape is quite surreal.

You may have seen this grotesque-looking tree, sometimes called the Cream of Tartar tree on a safari (if you're lucky) or in photos like the beautiful one above. 

It can grow to 70 feet (23m) and have a trunk diametre of more than 24 feet (8m)! Its bark is smooth, shiny, heavily folded and pinkish grey or coppery in colour. The single, large, whitish flowers appear from April to August.

In Zimbabwe, the Baobab grows in hot, dry areas below 3,000 feet (1,000m) in the Limpopo, Sabi and Zambesi River valleys. It is amazingly resilient - it can survive even when the inside is burnt by veld fires or all of the bark is stripped off.

Many parts of the tree can be put to good use:

• the bark - by pounding it, a fibre can be obtained for the production of rope and floor mats; 
• the white powder from around the seedlings can be used to make a kind of porridge or a refreshing drink, sometimes used to treat fever and dysentery; 
• the seeds, which have a slightly acidic and refreshing taste, can be sucked like sweets or they can be roasted and ground to make a coffee substitute;
• the pollen makes good glue;
• the fresh leaves can be boiled and used as vegetables or dried and used for cattle feed.

The information above and the picture below were taken from the only colouring book that has survived from my childhood. It's a lovely book because it is so informative and the pictures are great.

From the NRB colouring book -TREES AND SHRUBS

When I was 10, I remember reading and rereading a book by Enid Blyton called Hollow Tree House and thinking how cool it was that the characters Susan and Peter lived in a hollow tree, which could only mean a Baobab!

The Baobab is definitely on my shortlist of favourite trees, even though the Flamboyant is still my number one.

Do you have a favourite tree?

Edited to add:

Here is a fantastic post about the Baobab from de Wets Wild blog that you will enjoy!