I haven't posted for a few days, and I was hoping to post about something a little more serious, instead of yet another post full of pictures of flowers. But more serious means more writing, which means more time, and time is something I have a highly finite amount of. So flowers it is, again. More flowers than usual, even. Sorry about that, dialup user(s)!
The top photo, and a couple of others down the page are from O'Bryant Square, the place a lot of people consider to be downtown Portland's "needle park", although I've never actually seen any needles there. It would be more accurate to call it downtown's empty park, and I blame that on the surrounding area, not the park itself. The highly touted "Three Downtown Parks" plan proposes to rip out the underground parking beneath O'Bryant Square and turn it into some sort of mini nature preserve, which I imagine means giving it the ol' Tanner Springs treatment. But you can do all you like to the place and it'll still be empty of people until the surrounding area sees a little more pedestrian traffic. There was a story a few years ago that someone wanted to build a ritzy condo tower on the surface parking lot just north of the square, but that hasn't happened yet.
Back when I had a yard, it never would've occurred to me to photograph a dandelion as if it was just another kind of flower. Dandelions are the stuff of suburban male nightmares. Dandelions, and thistles, and anything that drops leaves in the fall, and scary teenagers, and the nosy neighbor who runs the homeowners' association, and creepy door-to-door salespeople, and on, and on, and on.
But as I said, now I don't have a yard, and this dandelion is someone else's problem. So I can just take a picture of it and be on my merry way.
I tend to get myself in trouble when I try to identify flowers, but I'm pretty sure this is an azalea. I'm even more sure it's pink.
I was originally going to do a smaller post that just had a few extreme closeups of flowers like this one, and title it something like "The naughty bits... EXPOSED!!!!". Which I'm sure would get me a lot more page views than the current title. But that just feels like a scam, somehow. Besides, I'm not actually selling banner ads here or anything. It's nice when people drop by and visit this humble, ever so humble, blog, but it doesn't really impact my bottom line either way. So I figure I'll just call it what it really is, and if anyone feels like visiting because of that, hey, that's great. Hi, everyone (if you exist)!
A daffodil, probably, in O'Bryant Square, definitely. More naughty bits.
A fern growing in a brick wall, in Ankeny Park, downtown. When you see a fern growing in a brick wall, it's generally a sign of poor maintenance, so this isn't actually a great thing to see. The wall itself is part of a 1920s-era public toilet, which is a little run-down on the outside, and (I'm told) astonishingly decrepit inside. So this is one of those cases where it's better to stick to extreme closeups.
Japanese maple (I think) in bloom. I didn't realize these had flowers at all until I was walking by and happened to notice these. Not the best photo ever; the damn things just wouldn't hold still for the camera, I'm afraid. Sorry.
People keep telling me this is a "tulip tree". Maybe they're right, or maybe I'm talking to the wrong people. Either way, even more naughty bits.
O'Bryant Square again. I recently checked the county library's database of old Oregonian stories for news stories about the square, and I was surprised at how little there really was. Apparently this was once a meeting ground for neo-Nazi skinheads, but that was like 20 years ago. Now it's just the occasional office worker eating lunch, or maybe a pigeon or two.
Fallen cherry(?) petals near Rusting Chunks No. 5, in the South Auditorium district.
I have no idea what kind of tree this is. Sorry. Nice flowers, though.
More of the same, but this time at night. This concludes today's fluffy and content-free post. Thanks for playing.
1 comment :
nice photographs <3
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