Butterflies and Buddhas

Thses photos were taken by my friend Jeannine Storey who is a very talented graphic artist. She designs the Gardening In Trinidad calendar every year and is the daughter of Joanne de Gannes, one of the Trinidad and Tobago's top landscape artists. My zinnias were a bit hit with the butterflies and seeing this makes me so glad that I have tried to cut out all spraying of insecticides. Butterflies are lovely but they are, of course, preceded by caterpillars. It is impossible to have one without the other. As children we were always surrounded by butterflies but they are becoming more and more rare. This is my new trellis - and this is my shade area where I grow gingers and calatheas. I tried everything as a border plant on these stairs but nothing would grow until I tried this long-leaved calathea which solved the problem.
A section in the front area of my garden This orange Datura does not last very long but is quite spectacular when it is in flower. This bed is filled with acalyphas, begonias, pachystachys, hibiscus and coleus.
This is a new bed and it is at the entrance to my garden. Once again because of heavy shade, I ma pretty much locked into calatheas for foliage patterning. A miniature ixora is doing well here and I have planted a pomegranate behind my buddha.

Thank you Jeannine.

Saving our Buildings

Building like this are at risk of disappearing overnight. Literally. You may go to bed one night and next morning drive past a heap of rubble. And the frightening thing is that when these buildings go, that's it. They are gone forever, There is no template to follow; no catalogue of local historical fretwork. The best we can do until the National Trust grows some teeth is to photograph and document as much as we can. This lovely building is the City Gate building which I believe was the old train station. The architecture is Georgian and reminds me very much of the buildings that I saw in New York.
A mystery. The logo below has a definite Rennie MacIntosh feel to it -Beautiful and almost calligraphic. Will this beautiful style come back into fashion again?
I love old structures because they remind me that not everything has a price tag. In this digital age of consumerism, it becomes easy to believe that anything can be replaced. These structures serve to remind us that reality still lies in the concrete and the tangible.