Bottlebrush Trees

Surprise! I fell in love with these trees in California, where they brought color to many gardens and parks. I also thought the name was so appropriate, the tree deserved twice as much respect and adoration. The flowers are aligned in a spiral only nature is capable of organizing. But I took a picture of a bottlebrush tree in Mildura (Victoria) that seemed to be at home. It looked healthy and rich in dark red flowers. I investigated and found out that the tree is native Australian, not an import from the Americas. Nice suprise!

Organ Pipes National Park

I am a bit ashamed that only recently I found out what tesselations were. Should I still claim being a scientist? Well, honestly, it's something I just didn't know about and in order to understand what they are in a practical, hands on way, I decided to learn from nature. The Organ Pipes National Park is nearby, West of Melbourne, and it contains rock formations from the time when a volcano spat out lava, about one million years ago. This lava turned into basalt, which is shaped like organ pipes (check out today's picture) because air bubbles passed through it while it cooled off, or is shaped in geometrical forms, or tesselations, where you can see (and step on) the top of the "organ pipes" in transversal sectioning. Thus, I learnt that tesselation is the repetition of a geometrical shape without gaps and overlaps, and every time I will hear this word from now on, I will picture walking on a cross-section of organ pipes in a unique park around Melbourne... Again and again, Australia amazes me with the archaism that characterizes fauna, flora and land. Such "organ pipe" basaltic formations are even in Europe, but seeing them here with a few sweaty kangaroos jumping elegantly in the background and reflected perfectly under the ozone-less, solid-blue sky, is out of this world. For me, anyway.

Protea

I heard about proteas and I saw the first ones only in Australia. Indeed, the entire family (Proteaceae) “lives” in South America, the South of Africa and Australia. It is an ancient family, easy to see if you look a the stiff simple leaves and the thistle-like flowers. The ancestors of today’s intriguing looking proteas (my picture) grew in Gondwana a few hundred millions of years ago. The petals are not soft, but they have a tomboish aspect; they are poky and bold. In fact the flower seems to be more a cone than a… flower. There are so many varieties of proteas, that Linnaeus gave their family the name Proteaceae after Proteus, the Greek God who changed his appearance whenever he pleased.

Alfred Nicholas Memorial Garden

The Dandenong Ranges are less than 30 km from us and although not very tall, these mountains are a rich splendor of fauna and flora. Fern gullies make a dense lower layer, whereas very tall mountain ash trees spring everywhere to create the "second floor" of the forest, quite close to the sky. Crimson rosellas, kookaburras, parrots, and cockatoos sew a lively web through the tree tops. Hidden somewhere in the ranges is the Alfred Nicholas Garden, which offers a quiet walk through mountain ashes and around a still pond, the perfect mirror for the surrounding forest. Sitting down on a bench and looking at the boathouse and its reflection in the pond makes me feel that the entire world is calm and green.

Winter and Camellias

As a child in the heart of the Romanian winter, I used to wear three layers of socks and shirts, two pairs of pants, gloves and a hat. Snow was sometimes taller than my father’s car and squeakier than a rusty bike wheel. One time I had to abandon a glove that got stuck on the metal door handle of the school. New York winters were drier but louder, with the wind’s strength and voice growing stronger at every block. Yet, when I moved another 3000 miles away, I had to adapt the way I alluded to cold. In New York cold gave me icicles of nose drip and in Los Angeles I never took the winter coat out of storage. Similar to LA, Melbourne gave me the gift of mild winter temperatures. Gloves and winter coat are still in the box I packed in New York. And like in LA, the best winter present I got are the camellias, the evergreen trees that belong to the Asian family who generously gave us the tea, too. Camellias grow happily in Melbourne, and when they bloom, they turn it into a giant Descanso Gardens, the place in Californian where I discovered them for the first time.

Stick Bugs (Part 3)

For a long time in my life I thought art was what had a label with a title and a name’s author. Art was locked in museums and galleries. But I wasn’t educated and instructed enough, so later I added music, ballet, and architecture, everything that made me feel the same heat in my chest that I felt when I saw the Endless Column of Brancusi in Tirgu Jiu and I was about 10 years old. Quite indiscriminate and open concept, border line with religion maybe. I know you are wondering what is the link to stick bugs. Well, I think if you saw the stick or leaf insects molting, you’d think that the nature’s art creation. These bugs eat lots of eucalyptus leaves, lots (see the picture), until their bodies are too big for their “skin” or exoskeleton. So they reshuffle the entire organic matter, their whole bodies, and squeeze out of the old skin as new, bigger bugs. Sometimes they get wings when they re-emerge from molting, and other times they lose a limb or two, or they change colors from brown to green or green to brown. And they are vulnerable, like art, when they re-appear from the molt. Yes, molting is a creative act and these creatures, if you agree or not, are not “Yuck, bugs!”, but “WOW! Beautiful!”

Stick Bugs (Part 2)

Stick insects are common in Queensland and some parts of New South Wales and Victoria. There are several species around, but what makes them a good pet is the fact that they are easy to keep. They eat eucalyptus leaves mostly and do not run around. They do not require lighting or heating. The females are parthenogenetic, so they lay eggs even in the absence of males, and they lay lots of them! It is one of the most touching things to sit in the room where we keep the bugs and hear the eggs drop one at a time, maybe every 20-30 minutes, through the eucalyptus leaves, like the drops of water falling from the canopy to the ground of the rain forest. These insects are large (our "monster female" is 28 cm long, legs included), and therefore, they move slowly. Males fly only when forced to do so, and then they sort of do it in a vertical position, with fan-like wings awkwardly flapping in the air. If threatened, stick bugs pretend to be a wooden stick by extending the front legs in front of the head and standing still or sometimes swaying as if they are a twig in the wind. In our very large cages, life can get crowded, as you see, and stick and leaf insects cannot tell each other, just holding on to whatever they think is a stick or a leaf...