The Pinnacle

About a month ago (how time flies when school gets started!), I spent almost two weeks in the Townships visiting my parents. I had a really nice time visiting old profs, seeing old friends, partying down at a wedding reception, and most importantly, relaxing. One highlight of the trip was hiking up the Pinnacle in Baldwin Mills. It's a fairly easy hike (we were able to do it with a 7-month pregnant lady in our party), and the scenery pay-off is pretty fantastic.

Without further ado, here are some of my favourite pictures from the hike. I hope you all become envious of the beautiful place I grew up in.

An Afternoon at the Allen Gardens

I'm currently in the Townships visiting my parents, but I thought I'd write an entry about something that happened almost a month ago... During the last week of August, my mom and my friend Stevie came to visit. Mom's primary purpose was to visit her mother, but Stevie wanted to do some touristy things. He suggested we go to the Allen Gardens, which, to be frank, I had never heard of before. My mom told me that she used to go there as a kid with her parents in the middle of February to escape into a tropical paradise for a few moments. It's totally free to go, and has been around since 1858.



At the centre of the park is the Palm House, a structure built in 1909 which houses a variety of tropical plants. My favourite was the cactus room.



Here are a few of the better pictures I took:

Deadly Nightshade in Toronto

It's interesting where the internet will take you... I started out today wanting to write a blog entry about a picture I took of what I thought to be belladona, or deadly nightshade, growing in a hedge on campus, and then to talk about how cool belladonna is.



However, I looked at my pictures, and then at the entry for Deadly Nightshade (a.k.a. Atropa Belladonna) on Wikipedia, and the flowers and the berries look a little bit different than this poisonous plant.



It turns out that this plant is actually Bittersweet Nightshade (a.k.a. Solanum Dulcamara), which is in the same family as belladonna, but not nearly as poisonous. I still wouldn't eat it. In fact, it's an invasive plant in this area, so I should probably have ripped it out, but the berries and flowers are so cute! Of course, I had to read about it on wikipedia for another half-hour...

Anyway, I have a few reasons to be interested in nightshade, one of which is that the Deadly Nightshade sleeves I knit a couple of months ago are based on that plant. Another is that nightshade is in the same family as tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants. The main toxin in bittersweet nightshade is solanine, which is present in small amounts in all of these, I think, especially potatoes that have been exposed to light for too long.

I'm fairly allergic to eggplants. When I eat enough of them, I get a stomach ache and a sore throat, and it feels like my airways are closing up, which, according to ehow, means I should go to the emergency room when I have a reaction. I'm not sure if it's the solanine in eggplant that makes me sick, but I've never had any problems with other members of the Solanum genus.

So this lead me to research eggplant allergies, which are apparently very rare, and this lead me to this article talking about a study performed in India on a guy who was allergic to eggplant... and then I got bored, played Mah Jong for a while and fell asleep.

Hundreds of crocuses

A defiant spread of crocuses, jagged,
Noble, everywhere in interstices
Of soil between rocks, showed,
Indifferent -- oh, indifferent. Whether
Prophecy had god, had doom in it
To come, they exulted, white,
Purple, stamens gold, six petals,
Unknown except you bend down to it.
But colour far, near, some yellow,
Out of the debris of April roots,
And marks and tendrils left in the snow gone.
Nobility was there to see, never
Mind resurrection, beauty
Was here.
_______A path of landscape,
An acre.
_______I gazed.
You looked again and to the right, behind,
A bunch of crocuses grew there.

-- Ralph Gustafson (1909-1995)

Note: I don't think those flowers are actually crocuses, but ever since the little flowers have started poking their heads through the grass, I've had this poem in my head. Ralph Gustafson lived near my hometown until he didn't live anymore, and my dad set a lot of his poetry to music, and I've been humming the tune to this one over and over...

Fall Colours

Oh poor blog, I have neglected you! I've been so busy over the last couple of weeks, that I haven't had an instant where I wouldn't have felt guilty writing in my blog instead of doing work. That doesn't mean I haven't been procrastinating in other ways, but somehow writing a post which requires me to invest something of myself into it seems much worse than playing silly online games.

Anyway, to make up for it, I'll show off some pretty pictures of the fall colours I took around campus. It seems like whenever I had my camera, the weather was cloudy, and so the lighting isn't fantastic, but it's still good 'n colourful.













Gosh... those seem rather bleak and depressing. Here are a few I took at an earlier date before the leaves had completely changed, but it was a sunnier day at least.









And a couple of other neat things...







Nothing like a bunch of pictures to assuage my guilt!

A rose is a rose

Hi interwebs! I just finished the defense for my summer project, and I'm totally exhausted, so this post won't be terribly long. In fact, I think I'll just post some pretty pictures. At any rate, posting will be more regular now, since I'm slightly less overwhelmed with work.

So, this is a rose I bought at the grocery store because it was pretty. I spent like 10 minutes trying to find the perfect one.

Grandma's flowers

My father's mother has always prided herself on having a beautiful garden. When we were up there last weekend, I took a few pictures. Here are some of the better ones:

Summer flowers

I might have said it before: the UofT downtown campus is beautiful in summer. I couldn't resist taking a few pictures of the lovely flowers all over campus, and here are a few of my favourites:

















I wish I knew what those fluffy pink ones are called...

Flowering trees

I think that my favourite thing about spring and early summer, besides all the plant live reviving, is the flowering trees. In Toronto, they're particularly lovely (I find), and there are several species I'd never even seen in the Townships. A couple of weeks ago (I know, I'm slow), my boyfriend asked me to take some pictures of the flowering trees around UofT campus so he could send them to his grandmother. Here are a few of my favourites (I took over 40!):