Zooming – July 2016

Instead of making collages from clips of images – I’m doing Zooming past the 30x my camera will do with its lens. It will do up to 120x although it is essentially in-camera cropping because it is utilizing the resolution of the sensor rather than the lens. At 120x the images sometimes begin to look like an impressionist painting with a softer focus – but they can also show a lot more detail than the eye can see. It is easier to get good results with a monopod (I dislike the bulk of a tripod although I might try it more frequently. I picked 8 of my favorite zoomed images from the past few weeks.

I like to be well back from insects so that my camera does not influence their behavior. I once had a praying mantis jump on my camera! So using the zoom to capture the milkweed tussock moth caterpillars was my preference. They are about only about a half inch long.

Reaching back into the overgrowth along a path if often not a good idea: too many plants with thorns (like these wine berries) and poison ivy. Standing back and using the zoom to get the picture is the way to go!

I didn’t want to chance getting the web these caterpillars were creating on the front of my camera by getting close…and zooming worked very well.

I’m sure this bug would have flown away if I’d tries to get close. I also like that the background is still there but out of focus. The flower is chicory; it was about the same diameter as a quarter.

Aphids! The white ones are an earlier stage than the yellow ones. They do move around so zooming rather than getting close is my preference.

This seed stalk of a pokeweed was back in the waste high brush – glad I didn’t have to push my way thought it to get this image. I liked the pink and green. Later the seeds will be a deep purple.

This tiger swallowtail is enjoying a nectar snack! He would have flown away had I been close at all.

This is a max zoom photograph of a swallowtail wings. There is a fine line between nature photography and abstract art!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – July 2016

Our July has been hot….a very summery month. My celebrations included.

Fireworks – but on July 9^th rather than on the 4^th. It was just when our local community held their event. We did buy a watermelon to enjoy on the 4^th of July – a typical food for summer celebrations.

“The Mother Nature” Award – I was so pleased to be recognized by the Howard County Conservancy for my volunteering with them. The contents of the goody bag (artisan bread and strawberry jam) was part of my little celebrations for about a week!

Photography with campers -  I’ve just finished 2 days of nature photography sessions with campers aged 5-12…and I am celebrating their photographs. I’m glad I’ve made it through the 2 very hot days too. Blog posts about the experience to come in the next few weeks.

Green Heron – I always celebrate seeing a bird in the wild that I don’t see very often…the green heron at Kenilworth is a good example. It was certainly the highpoint of that visit to the gardens.

Butterfly outreach – I volunteered to assist with butterfly outreach to 4 Montessori schools this month…one of which my daughter attended 20 years ago! I celebrated that the school is still going strong, much the same as it was when my daughter attended and the wonderful interaction with the children that are there now. They were all very interested in learning about butterflies.

Indoors, staying cool – We’ve had some very hot days recently and I celebrated most of them staying indoors with air conditioning – glad that I didn’t need to do anything outside!

Milkweed tussock caterpillars – Since I have quite a crop of these caterpillars at my house I have been able to photography them a lot this season. I’ll be doing an update soon since they are now even bigger than they were when I posted about them earlier this month.

Kitchen flooring – We have started the process to replace the flooring in our kitchen. It is 25 years old and needs to be done. I celebrated that my husband and I agreed easily on what we wanted and the materials have been ordered.

Carrot cake and Zucchini bread – This is two celebrations. I am using the bounty from my CSA to bake. I love having one of these for breakfast these days so the ‘celebration’ continues for more than just the day that I back. And I have bags of shredded zucchini in the freezer to make more!

Froghopper (spittlebug)

I’ve seen lots of froghoppers/spittlebugs (or the ‘spit’ from then); it turns out that the ‘spit’ if from the nymph stage of the insect so I had no idea what this pink and yellow bug was that I saw on the underside of a milkweed leaf. The skin it had just shed was underneath the bug…and it was about 1/3-inch long. All I thought initially was that it was a 'pretty bug.'

At first I thought it was a nymph of some kind but then I realized it had wings that just hadn’t dried enough to be fully recognizable. My son-in-law helped me identify it from the picture.

A day later I looked again and I think I found the same bug on the milkweed plant. It had moved from the underside of the leaf to the main stem was very still head down on the plant.

The old skin was still on the underside of the leaf (the yellow insect next to it is an aphid).

I wanted the insect spew tiny water droplets onto the adjacent leaf. Mature froghoppers still suck juices from plants but instead of making ‘spit’ it is tiny water droplets!

3 Free eBooks – July 2016

So many good things available for ‘free’ in online libraries. Here are my favorites for June.

Mann, Kathleen. Design from Peasant Art. New York: Macmillan. 1939. Available from Hathi Trust here. I get lots of ideas that turn into Zentangle patterns from books like this. I’ve clipped one page that had depictions of pinks (the flower) in different folk art. This is not the only folk art books I’ve enjoyed in July. It seems that there were quite a few book published on the topic in the early half of the 1900s and many of them are beings scanned and made available when their copyright expires.

Pole-Evans, I.B. The Flowering Plants of South Africa.  Twenty plus volumes available from the Internet Archive here. This is a magazine that has been published since 1921; at first it was published annually and it is now published every other year. The older volumes were made available on the Internet Archive in late June. I’ve enjoyed the first 10 so far. The depictions of flowering plants are outstanding.

Murphy, Thomas D. On sunset highways; a book of motor rambles in California. Boston: The Page Company. 1915. Available from Hathi Trust here. I enjoyed the pictures of what California was like in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, many of the color pictures have moiré patterns which I wish the institution scanning would have noticed and re-scanned. The original must be a beautiful book.

Eastern Painted Turtle at Kenilworth Gardens

On one of our visits to Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, there was a crowd around one of the ponds looking at – not lotuses or water lilies – but a turtle. I think a child had spotted it first but then everyone around looked too. It was surprising how difficult it was to see it in the pond. It was a rather small one and it was sitting in a puddle of water on a lily pad.

It seems more interested in the bees that were visiting a nearby flower than it was the people at the edge pf the pond.

I took enough pictures to identify it as a young Eastern Painted Turtle when I got home. On other visits we saw other turtles but they were in the water and not very photogenic. Maybe it was the season. We are past the time when the turtles need to sun on logs to get warm!

Deck Garden Challenges – July 2016

Through June and into July, it rained frequently enough for the pots on the deck to not need other attention. The day lilies bloomed profusely earlier in the month with almost no effort on my part. Give them a reasonably deep pot and they do great.

But then the rains stopped. Everything started to wilt and I pulled the house attached to the spigot down below up to the deck to make watering easier. Now that the temperatures are getting into the high 80s or 90s in our area of Maryland, I water every morning while the deck is still in the shade and the temperatures are still in the 70s. I empty and refill the bird bath every morning too (a way to make sure I am not breeding mosquitoes!).

The day lilies are about done for the season. I’m going to use every pot and large container I have around to transplant day lily bulbs from the flower beds where the deer at the flowers before they could bloom. There are both yellow and red day lilies that should bloom on the deck next summer if I manage to dig the right bulbs!

I’m transferring attention to plants that the birds and butterflies will like now or when they go to seed in the fall. I’ve already had gold finches checking the zinnias; the flowers have not quite got to seed yet so this bird was out of luck.

The black eyed susans will be popular for their seeds too. I planted some sunflowers but they don’t even have buds yet.

I haven’t harvested any mint yet this year and I’m not sure that I will. I love the smell of the plants when I am watering.

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 16, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

The Chemistry of Bell Peppers – Green to Yellow to Red….the chemistry of the pepper’s color change.

Ancient Brazilians occupied the same homes for centuries – Homes that were never abandoned…just extended with new floors on top of old ones, different types of ceramics and new building techniques.

Photography in the National Parks: Don’t Forget to Pack Your Flash or Reflector for Some Fill Light – This post shows images in bright sunlight with and without flash/reflector….a good ‘lesson’ in improving photos of flowers particularly.

Discover Your World with NOAA: An Activity Book – For kids and educators. The Earth Origami activity was one I looked at. This is quite a treasure trove of activities…all available online.

How to Raise Brilliant Children, According to Science – An interview with the author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. She defines 6 Cs: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creating innovation and confidence spread across 4 levels of development (summarized as seeing is believing, multiple points of view, opinions, and evidence/mastery/intricacies of doubt).

Professor finds positive effects for bringing physical activity to the desk – A positive link between mood, motivation and physical activity without detracting from work or study effectiveness…what’s not to like. For me – the Swopper chair seems to have these effects.

The People vs Coloring Books: The verdict is in – For children…the overall message may be to ‘step away from the coloring book’ and celebrate difference rather than conformity. When I was cleaning out my daughter’s papers from 1^st grade (over 20 years ago) I found a lot of lightly used coloring book type pages; it appears that she didn’t like them very much. She recognized them for what they were – busy work.

Incidence of cancer in patients with large colorectal polyps lower than previously thought – 92% of the colorectal patients referred for operation were noncancerous! My family had this experience and it is interesting to find out that it is not uncommon. Hopefully the more advanced endoscopic techniques can replace the traditional operation in some of these cases.

7 ways to find things to do in nature near you (US Edition) – Good ideas!

Butylparaben can have several endocrine disrupting effects – This is an ingredient (preservative) in many cosmetics and skin care products. Whatever testing was done in the past on the chemical probably did not even check for this kind of issue. And now we have a pervasive chemical that is impacting our biology in a negative way.

Insects in our Garden

A few days ago was out working in our garden by 7 AM – pulling weeds and cutting spent flower stalks in our flower beds…but I got sidetracked observing insects. The first I noticed were on the skeleton of a milkweed plant. The milkweed tussock caterpillars had eaten all the leaves leaving only the stem and the larger veins of the leaves. They had started crawling over to the bush next to the stem. It seemed like there were hundreds of caterpillars.

After I finished some work, I went inside to clean up and recover from heat. I started wondering if the caterpillars would find the other milkweed plants that were about 5 feet away from the one they had consumed. I went to check at 9 and they had indeed found another plant! I continued to check periodically throughout the day. The gradually spread to 3 more plants. Sometimes they would appear very active and other times they would be resting underneath a leave that was still whole. When they ate, individuals worked on the leaf from the top and the bottom. It was a mass feeding frenzy.

The next surprise came the following morning. I went outside and found that the caterpillars had been active overnight and seemed to be larger. When I went back to check an hour later – more than half of them were not anywhere on the milkweed and I watched as more of them dropped off the plants. It was time for them to go roaming in the leaf litter!

On one of the checks of the caterpillars, I noticed some insects on a blazing start that was in bloom. They were tiny – about a quarter inch. The yellow and black insect is a syrphid or hoverfly.

There were two other insects on the plant but they stayed down in the flowers so much that it was hard to get a good identification.

Maybe some kind of bee?

The two types of insects did interact a little…did not seem to like the other being nearby.

I was very pleased with the performance of my camera (Canon PowerShot SX710HS) and the monopod’s contribution to stabilizing the camera to get clear images.

CSA Week 7

I used up a lot of the week 6 squash by making 2 batches of zucchini bread – one as little cakes which I have been enjoying for breakfast.

I also used the week 5 bunch of carrots to make a carrot cake. I didn’t make icing for the cake – so it will work for breakfast as well. Needless to say, with only my husband and I around more than half the baked goods are now in the freezer! Otherwise I did well eating up the veggies from week 6 – only some carrots and cucumbers were left when I went to pick up the next share.

The medium share at our CSA this week was ‘heavy’ both in terms of size (two bags again) and weight (included 6 pounds of squash and 3 pound of cucumbers). Starting up at the upper left corner and working around the picture below clockwise: cucumbers, onions, carrots, summer squash, chard, basil, lettuce, and kohlrabi. The hotter days will reduce the greens in a few weeks but now we have plenty for salad stuff: lettuce, carrot tops, basil, and chard.

I’ve already decided to shred the squash and freeze it in 2 cup portions. 6 pounds is a lot of squash! It will take up less space to freeze in that form than baking it already into zucchini bread to freeze. I might do something similar with the carrots although I haven’t gotten tired of carrot raisin salad yet.

Lotuses at Kenilworth Gardens

The lotuses at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens are in bloom in June and July each year. We’ve visited three times so far this year…and the lotuses were the most numerous and largest flowers of the place. They grow in shallow ponds and range in color from white to darker pink. The leaves are lived out of the water on stalks; the leaves are large and round with veins that radiate from the center.

The stalks that end in buds, flowers, or seed pods rise above the leave layer. The ponds contain many stages of lotus development during this season. Eventually – only the pods will remain.

I’ve organized some pictures to show the development toward seed pods….starting with buds and newly opened flowers. Dragon flies often alight on the tips of the buds – a good perch for them because of the small diameter and relative stability of the stalk in the breeze compared to the stalks with full flowers.

Then the flower is fully open and insects are frequent visitors. As long as the central portion is yellow – the flower has not yet been pollinated.

The flowers follow the sun. These are my favorite images of the flowers…when they glow with the sunlight through their petals.

Eventually the flower has been pollinated and the center part turns green and the rest of the flower begins to fall apart. This flower grew up into the lowest branches of a bald cypress.

The petals fall off and the seed pod is all that remains. The pods start to mature. They dry out as the seeds mature but none of them are at that stage yet this year. The petals last a little longer if they fall onto leaves rather than into the water but they decay very rapidly even on the leaves.

Most of the time the leaves are above the water forming shallow bowls that undulate in the breeze but there are exceptions. If they are on the water surface – they often have large beads of water that last much longer than dew on a summer day. They reminded me of glass pebbles used with flower arrangements or a form of abstract art.

Buttonbush – Pickerel Weed – Horse Nettle

There are other plants at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens besides water lilies and lotuses. Three that I noticed – and was pleased that I recognized – were buttonbush, pickerel weed, and horse nettle. The button bush grows at the edges of many of the ponds – often under a larger tree so that the bush is at least partially in the shade.

The flowers form round balls on the plant. They are green toward the center then white.

And the bees love them at certain stages of their bloom.

The pickerel week grows at the edge of ponds – in wetter ground that the button bush – and it likes full sun.

The arrow shaped leaves point upward.

The flowers start blooming at the bottom and move up to the tip of the stem….keeping the bees happy for the duration.

I spotted horse nettle near the ponds as well. This is a weed that is native…and very common to our area. It grows in our front flower bed (where I promptly pull it up) and in the meadow at the Howard County Conservancy. During the fall hikes the children always comment about this plant’s yellow fruits that look like tomatoes….and I tell them right away that they may look like tomatoes but they are definitely not tomatoes; the fruits are poisonous.

Kenilworth Water Lilies

The two dominate plants at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens during June and July are the water lilies and the lotuses. The sign for the visitor center has a water lily design. The flowers rest at almost the same level as the leaves very near the water surface while the lotuses are above the water – the leaves being a layer that flutters below the flowers that are higher still. I like photographing water lilies – particularly ones that have a lot of color and the background is dark enough to set off the color.

I always wonder what causes the plants to grow only in part of a pond. Perhaps it has to do with water depth.

During our visit in late June there were quite a few geese in one of the ponds that was filled completely with water lilies. They moved through the heavy foliage. They just swim through the foliage and the plants close behind the big birds. I zoomed in (series below) to get a closer look at the geese and noticed that some were juveniles – just beginning to get their adult markings.

As usual – I looked particularly to find flowers that be being visited by bees. Do you think these two bees are the same kind of bee? The lighting makes it hard to tell.

CSA Week 6

I am not getting further behind as far as clearing out the crispers – but I’m not catching up either. This week I still had carrots, a full head of cabbage, some broccoli, and a few beet leaves left from the week 5 medium share….and it was another 2 bag share for week 6.

Starting in the upper left corner: collard greens (one of my favors for rolling up and cutting in small pieces for slaw), fennel (new this week…and I haven’t decided what to do with it yet), onions (not cured so have to be used relatively quickly – they had been out on a trailer beside the barn and were warm from the sun….very alive), beets (the beets will become fruit beety that will go into the freezer and I’ll eat the leaves in salads, the stems in stir fry), hiding behind the beet is a small bunch of arugula ( from the overage table since adds flavor to any salad), cabbage, 3 pounds of summer squash (all the zucchini is going for zucchini bread – some of which will be frozen), 3 pounds of cucumbers (I tried to get small ones and will put one in every salad until they are going), lettuce (this will have to be eaten before the beet and collard greens) as well the carrot tops (I have so many carrots…some of them will have to go toward carrot cake).

Whew! That’s a lot of veggies.

Spent Lotus Flowers

We are making weekly jaunts to Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens since the later part of June. The lotuses and water lilies are in bloom during this time. It’s a good place for photography projects. One of my experiments the last time we went was to capture recently jettisoned flower parts on the big round leaves. I liked the colors – white, yellow, green…and occasional tinge of pink – and the curves. The first on I photographed still had water droplets left from the rain during the night.

The petals don’t last long once they fall. This one was a little past its prime but I liked the curves at the attachment end of the petals and the undulation of the leaf.

Sometimes they curve back onto themselves. The edges furthest from the attachment end of these petals have a tinge of pink…and the veins of the leaf under them seem to be radiating from the petal-as-sculpture.

Sometimes other parts of the flower spill onto the leaves while the larger petals slide down into the water below.

This leave held almost an entire flower with the petals turned in different ways. The pink edge shows on one of them. The veins of the leaf underneath don’t look as straight as when seen from the top.

I wondered how the flower parts came to be arranged. These seem neatly stacked!

I have a series of posts planned with images from the aquatic gardens...so stay tuned for lotuses, dragon flies, water lilies, and other things observed at this special place.

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 2, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

8 Ways to Protect your Eyes if you stare at Screens All Day – You probably have heard of most of these before….but how many do you actually include in your day to day screen time? I just recently got computer glasses…now wish I would have done it years ago.

The Rabies Vaccine Backstory – A little bit of medical history for the week.

Ten simple rules to use statistics effectively – The report is intended for the research community – but it seems like just about everyone needs to understand these. We are bombarded by statistics at every turn…and many times they are coming from outside our area of expertise; we have to make a conscious decision about how ‘real’ what they reveal might be.

Are your pipes made of lead? Here’s a quick way to find out – With Flint, Michigan’s problems with lead in their water supply being in the news, why not do a quick check to see if the pipe bringing water into your house are made of lead?

CDC to Track Algal Blooms – Evidently algal blooms have become enough of a health hazard to warrant this step.

4,200-year-old Egyptian Temple Discovered to have Remarkably Well Preserved Artwork – Images of the same temple from several photographers. One show half the ceiling cleaned…half still covered with soot. I wondered if the soot actually served to protect some of the pigment from being scoured by sand over the years.

Journey Through the Largest Cave in the World – It’s a cave discovered in 2009 in Vietnam. There are sinkholes that allow light into parts of the cave…a jungle inside the cave.

No association between ‘bad cholesterol’ and elderly deaths – Systematic review of studies of over 68,000 people…questions about the benefits of statin drug treatments for them. Older people with high level of a certain type of cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein) actually live as long, and often longer, than their peers with low levels of this same cholesterol. This implies that what is true for cholesterol for young and middle-aged people is not for older people!

A virtual field trip to the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland and Siccar Point, Scotland – Some online geology!

Hubble Images of Jupiter’s “Northern Lights” are Amazing! – Something new to know about Jupiter – it has a much stronger magnetic field than Earth…and Aurora’s along with it.

Day Lilies

The deer are very hard on the day lilies in our flower beds. Most of the time they eat the buds before they can open. This year I have implemented a strategy of sticking the small branches that self-prune from our oak among the day lilies so that the deer get a bite of sticks along with the buds. It has slowed them down a little….but not much. The yellow ones that blooms were very low in other foliage and almost under some bushes.

The only orange ones that survived looked like they were blooming inside the bush!

I cut some buds the deer skipped because of the sticks (eating all the others that did not have enough sticks) and put them in a vase to so some photography. I discovered just how fast the flowers open. The first picture was at 6:40 AM.

Two hours later they were about half open. And I took a lot more pictures of them (including the picture of the stalk in the vase. I liked the lighting outside – using the green of the trees as a backdrop.

By noon the flowers were open. They only last the day – hence the name of these flowers.

After last year’s fiasco when I had no flowers at all because of the deer, I dug up some of the bulbs to put in pots on the deck. I noted the times for the photographs. This first set was at 7 AM. Not there were was already a spent flower to the left of the one that is opening…and lots of enlarging buds.

By 11 AM the flower was open.

Two days later, many of the buds had opened and were already wilting.

Another pot had a different lily. The first picture was at 9 AM.

The second is at 8 PM the same day. The petals are already beginning to wilt…the pollen has been spent....but there are still buds to open on subsequent days.

I’m going to dig up more bulbs this season so that I can enjoy them on the next next summer.

CSA Week 5

It was another two bag week at the Gorman Farm CSA this week….another good week of eating skewed toward the veggie side. Starting in the upper left of the picture below there are: 2 kohlrabi (roots and leaves), 2 pounds of summer squash (I got 3 yellow and one green), cone head cabbage, scallions, 1 pound of cucumbers, 1 pound of broccoli, arugula, beets (roots and leaves), carrots with tops, and kale. The scallions were from the overage table where I could have gotten more greens (collard greens or chard) but I still have both left from last week.

Not the variety of leaf shapes and sizes between the kohlrabi leaves (large), the beet (red veins) and the arugula (convoluted margins). The beet leaves and arugula will be eaten with the carrot tops in salads. I am still trying to decide whether to make the kohlrabi leaves into chips just like I intend to do with the kale.

After I had cleaned up from the first round of prep of the veggies into plastic bins, I found this tiny leaf. I think it might have been from the kohlrabi. It was only about an inch long....very delicate.

I have been eating a lot of the stems but decided to start freezing more of them so that I will skew what I eat now to leaves that will not survive freezing. The stems have to be cooked (steamed, stir fried, or put into soups) because they are so tough – they work well coming from the freezer. In fact, freezing may reduce the cooking required.

Zooming – June 2016

My favorite topics for zooming are the usual: birds, plants, and insects! Click on each of the six images to see a larger version. It was hard to top at six collages because there were so many images to clip. After I went overboard early in the week with the Mesa Verde post – I decided that 6 was enough already. The first image includes a house finch, sweet bay, iris, strawberry and peony.

Next comes a monarch butterfly, a poppy, a mourning dove, the center of a flower, and a thistle.

Then allium ball, the back of a flower and another center, and hydrangea growing on a rock wall.

Then an all-insect collage: a dragonfly, a monarch caterpillar, a bumble bee, a black swallowtail caterpillar and two butterflies.

Next is an all plant collage: castor beans, datura, day lily, canna.

Finally – a moth, two pictures of southern magnolia flowers (l like the curves of the petals around the forming seed pods), and an Asian dogwood.

3 Free eBooks – June 2016

My pick for the ‘3 Free eBooks’ post for this month is a 4 volume set:

Pratt, Anne (revised by Edward Strep). The flowering plants, grasses, sedges, & ferns of Great Britain and their allies, the club mosses, horsetails, etc. London: Frederick Warne & Co. 1905. Available from the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4.

Note that these books were published (originally in the 1870s) by the same company that published Beatrix Potter’s books a generation later.

This 1905 was an edition published after Pratt’s death in 1893. I enjoyed the illustrations in all 4 volumes and am in the process of looking at other books on the Internet Archive by Anne Pratt. According to Wikipedia she was ‘one of the best known English botanical illustrators of the Victorian age.’ I’ve clipped a few examples to include in this post.

Mesa Verde in 1980

I posted a picture of our camp in Mesa Verde from August 1980. We cooked everything over a camp fire or on our Coleman stove. It rained every afternoon but we still managed to see quite a bit of the National Park. We drove around the park and got pretty good at spotting identified ruins and ones that seemed to be in every nook of the cliffs. Can you find the ruins in each of the images in the slideshow below?

Of course – there are some that are possible to get a better view – close enough to see the complexity of the places. As I look at these now, I realize that they would have all had flat roofs when they were inhabited…and that would make them look very different.

The pit houses on top of the mesa were quite different from the cliff dwellings structurally - and more exposed to the weather and enemies. I picked up a pinion pine cone at one of the stops and got sap on the dash of our car…and left the pine cone at the next stop.

Closer to the dwellings, it was possible to tell more about how they were constructed – how beams were placed to make floors,

How the walls were plastered and designs painted on the inside,

Very narrow steps down into a kiva,

T shaped doors,

And a spiral made on a stone.

My husband enjoys botanical photography as much as I do….so there are those kinds of images in the set of slides as well.

We haven’t been back to Mesa Verde since 1980. It would be interesting to see what has changed…what has stayed the same. This time my husband would not be the only one with a camera.