Flowers, Trees and Prayer Flags

 

Last week I took you to the Spirit Guides exhibition at the Sonoma Botanical Garden. Most of the colorful sculptures are displayed along the California Oaks Trail where a California Native Garden had also been created. But this botanical garden had so much more to offer.

The California Oaks Trail leads right into the "heart" of the garden which is focused on plants from Asia. As soon as you enter the Asian part, you find yourself in beautiful wooded areas with lots of shade and you feel a drop in temperature which is very welcome on those warm and hot summer days.

We were extremely lucky that the Emmenopterys henryi tree, native to China, was in bloom. We first only saw its display of creamy-white leaves.

But getting closer, we noticed the actual flowers. This tree is very rare and near-threatened in the wild. While it may produce a few flowers some years, a big bloom like this one is unusual. The last time that this tree bloomed "bigly" was in 2022. The creamy-white flowers have a sweet jasmine-like scent.

Being in an Asian garden, you would expect an arched bridge.

Beautiful art sculptures of birds could be found in the dense foliage.

I especially liked the base of this tree, a Père David's Maple (Acer davidii).

The pictures you see today are actually from two visits to the botanical garden, because a week after I was there with Liz, I took the Geek there as well. The two of us walked a little bit further than I did with Liz, and we decided to take the short, but steep climb to the summit. 

We had to go through this beautiful conifer tunnel.

There is a prayer flag display at the summit. When I was here the very first time - 2010 or 2011, when it was still called Quarryhill Garden - the prayer flags had already been here, and some of them showed their age.

It's a beautiful quiet spot, and thankfully there was a bench where the Geek and I took a short rest and enjoyed the beautiful view over the Valley of the Moon. Right across from us is Jack London State Historic Park, another favorite place of mine.

Back in the woods I was delighted by all the beautiful flowers and berries.

Some kind of magnolia (there wasn't a sign and I wasn't able to find out what kind of magnolia this is),

a viburnum, I think, maybe Viburnum dilatatum, but I'm not sure,

and Fringed Pink (Dianthus superbus).

Then we discovered something very interesting, and I think Erika aka BioArtGal will like this. A tree nest for honeybees!

Aren't these flowers beautiful? I have no idea what exactly they are, so Liz and I decided to call them "tall water lilies".

Of course, there were "normal" water lilies as well. When Liz and I were there they covered the pond, but a week later they were all gone. I guess they have become too invasive and the garden staff had decided to remove them.

Above the lower pond we saw Himalayan Gloxinia (Incarvillea arguta) and if you look closely, you can see an Anna's Hummingbird in the lower left corner - I blends into the green of the foliage behind it. There were so many hummingbirds flitting around this flower.

One flower that shouldn't be missed in an Asian garden is the Japanese Anemone (Eriocapitella x hybrida). They are stunning, but can get quite invasive. However, they do fit into this kind of garden.

These are my flower faces for Nicole's Friday Face Off today.

Spirit Guides

 

Camel-Eagle

Last week my friend Liz and I visited the Sonoma Botanical Garden because we wanted to see the exhibition "Spirit Guides - Fantastical Creatures from the Workshop of Jacobo and María Ángeles". It was fantastic.

The first sculpture greeted us in front of the Welcome Center, Camel-Eagle. When you stand behind the sculpture you can see the hump.

The eight monumental sculptures, made from fiberglass and painted with acrylic paint, are distributed throughout the garden, most of them along the California Oaks Trail.

The sculptures are inspired by the astrology of the Mesoamerican Zapotecs. Zapotec astrology features animals associated with birth dates. These animals can be symbolic of personality traits, but they are also believed to share a destiny and soul with their human counterparts. 

 This is Coyote-Fish. As you can see here, these are rather strange animals - coyotes with fish tails, eagles with camel humps, monkeys with iguana backs etc. Fantastical creatures indeed.

Every part of the animal is painted in great detail.

The Crane - the only animal sculpture that didn't have a part of another animal.

Jacobo and María Ángeles are a Mexican artist couple from San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, where they operate a community workshop providing training and emplyment to hundreds of local artists. Their work blends contemporary sculpture with Mesoamerican cultural traditions and patterns found in Indigenous Mexican artwork. 

The Monkey-Iguana:

This artwork draws on Zapotec beliefs about animals that share a spiritual bond with humas. For many Zapotecs, and other Indigenous Mexican people, special animals called tonas and nahuales act as spiritual companions or guides. Assigned to each person at birth, any animal may be a spirit guide, from butterflies to jaguars to monkeys. Different people interpret the influence of these animals in different ways - guardians, shapeshifters and companions with intertwined souls and fates.

Tonas and nahuales can also embody their human counterparts' personalities. The monkey, for example, symbolizes knowledge and an affinity for the arts, while the iguana characterizes an ability to adapt and persevere.

The Armadillo-Insect:

The following sculpture was my favorite one - the Jaguar-Eagle.

Look at this beautiful and intense face!

In my humble opinion, I think the Rabbit-Deer should have the name Rabbit-Antelope. Those horns don't look like a deer antler.

The head of the rabbit was exquisite.

A close-up of the pattern at its neck. The symbol is the seed and stands for fertility.

Lastly we came upon the Deer-Butterfly.

According to the Zapotec astrological calendar the deer symbolizes agility and energy, while the butterfly represents hope and optimism.

Aren't these some wonderful faces and worthy for Nicole's Friday Face Off?

Finally Back to the Lake

 

You might remember that at the beginning of May I hurt my leg and was diagnosed with ITBS (iliotibial band syndrome). After stretching brought some relief but didn't result in healing, my GP referred me to PT. I tried to get into the PT practice that helped me after my knee surgery, but they canceled my first appointment 90 minutes before it with the reasoning that they don't accept referrals from my doctor's network anymore. As you can imagine, I was livid! Thankfully my GP referred me to a different PT which had an opening two weeks later and today, I "graduated" from 9 weeks of PT. The leg isn't 100%, but so much better. I will continue doing my home program, confident that it will further help me. 

The wonderful outcome is that I can walk again. So a couple weeks ago I went for a short, 30-minute walk at the lake - finally! 

It felt so good to put on my hiking boots again.

I chose one of my favorite trails. You can see the lake through the trees.

This is my favorite tree, an old crooked oak, overgrown with poison oak at its base.

A bird feather and an acorn on the ground.

Often there are people who fish from the pier at the boat launch.

Then I saw this little American Mink. I had never seen one before, and I first thought it was a baby otter since there are otters in the lake. But no, my research told me it's an American Mink. S/he had just caught a small crayfish.

Since I was there last, the Water Hyacinth has spread considerably. It is a very invasive, non-native plant. Its flowers look beautiful, but I wish it wasn't there.

Blackberry bushes loaded with berries lined the path along the water. These are quite invasive as well.

It had felt so good to be back again. Since then I have taken a few more walks in favorite places that I missed so much over most of the summer. More about that sometime in the future.