Today's Flowers; a few tropicals;

Heliconia bihai (please enlarge pictures, click)

Mussaenda erythrophylla;

Heliconia rostrata;

Anthurium (these are good to pick for vases and last long.

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Photos TS my garden;

Food for thought; January 2011;

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."

Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese monk, activist and writer.

So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious." Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." : Samuel P. Huntington

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests". Gore Vidal

Today's Flowers; Callistemon/Bottlebrush;

Callistemon Violacea;

Callistemon...from Greek kalos; beautiful and stemon; stamens.

Pictures TS from my garden; please click...

Although one of the older Callistemon cultivars, Callistemon 'Violaceus' is typical of some of the excellent, colourful bottlebrush cultivars and hybrids that have become available in recent years. Similar cultivars include 'Purple Splendour', 'Purple Cloud' and 'Mauve Mist'. All of these form dense, bushy shrubs 2-3 metres tall by a similar spread, producing yellow-tipped purple brushes in mid to late spring (October to November). They are hardy shrubs which will withstand at least moderate frost and which flower best in a sunny position.
Like most Callistemon cultivars, C.'Violaceus' produces viable seed which germinates easily. However, because of seedling variation, any plants produced from this seed will not be identical to the parent plant and cannot be called 'Violaceus'. Plants produced from cuttings (which usually strike readily) will produce genetically identical plants to the parent.
Many callistemons can tolerate less than perfect drainage but usually perform best in gardens with reasonable drainage and regular availability of water. Callistemons respond well to annual fertilising after flowering and are not as sensitive as some other Australian plants to phosphorus.

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Today's Flowers; Pond flowers;

Please click the pictures;

Pickerel Rush; Pondeteria cordata.

This is a very pretty plant for your pond. Easy and freely flowering.

The Pickerel Rush, also known as Pickerel Weed, Pickerelweed, and Wampee,

is named after the Italian botanist, Giulio Pondeteria.

Shiny, green, spear-shaped foliage with distinctive swirling send up spikes of soft blue flowers, reaching 18 to 24" tall, or slightly more. The flower spikes grow from leaf bracts at the top of stems. The plant adapts from very shallow water to depths of up to 18".

Plant the Pickerel Rush in a 5-gallon or larger pot to accommodate strong and plump roots. The pot should be placed in sun to part shade, and the plant will bloom in late spring through early autumn. Divide plants in spring while pruning away the rotting portions from the previous year. Stolon cuttings may be taken in summer and started, or a new plant may be started from fresh seeds collected in late summer and planted. Zones 4-11.

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My Library; The Return; Victoria Hislop;

The Return by Victoria Hislop.

The story is sad; the daughter returning to the birth country of her mother.

It is a sad history of the Spanish civil war. So many lives changed at the whim of politics. Prosecuted, incarcerated, forced labour and killed; all those people died because of savage, fascist politics, which have lasted from 1936 t0 1975.

General Francisco Franco, was a murderer together with his Government in unison with the western governments. He and his government were never brought before Justice.

Please click to read;

A bit of Philosophy; Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC)

Nature survives!

Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC) (Greek Thoukydídes) a Greek historian and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC.

Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" because of his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis in terms of cause and effect without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work

He has also been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the relations between nations as based on might rather than right.

His classical text is still studied at advanced military colleges worldwide, and the Melian dialogue remains a seminal work of international relations theory.

More generally, Thucydides showed interest in developing an understanding human nature to explain behaviour in such crises as plague ,massacres, as in that of the Melians, and civil war.

Viewed as a tragedy, his portrayal of the Peloponnesian War leads us to a very different set of questions, understandings of politics and of knowledge itself.

Greek tragedy was rooted in the empirical observation that there is no relationship between justice and suffering. Tragedy confronts us with our frailties and limits and the disastrous consequences of trying to exceed them. It advances a counter-intuitive thesis: that efforts to limit suffering through the accumulation of knowledge or power might invite more suffering. Thucydides drew heavily on epic poetry and tragedy to construct his history, which not surprisingly is also constructed as a narrative

Thucydides sees himself as an Athenian. His father was Olorus, he was from the Athenian deme of Halimous He survived the Plague of Athens that killed Pericles and many other Athenians. He owned gold mines at Scapte Hyle, a coastal area in Thrace, opposite the island of Thasos.

The maxim of Thucydides, that the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must, which holds with its customary precision.

When a politician uses the word “folks,” we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

sourced and footnoted in Noam Chomsky’s new book Hopes and Prospects.]

Copyright 2010 Noam Chomsky

some excerpts courtesy Wikipedia)

My Library; A Novel, Someone Knows My Name;

Someone Knows My Name; by Lawrence Hill;

It was originally published in Canada under the title The Book of Negroes;

Slavery in any form is a very dark and shameful mark through all the centuries on the people of all races who were involved in buying, selling and owning other human beings.

The magnitude of these crimes will never be forgotten or extenuated.

From Page 234

The people of Great Britain and other seafearing nations have devised unspeakable punishment

for the children of Ham, but in that moment and in that time, none seemed worse than their own self-inflicted torture: to sit unmoving but forbidden to sleep, in a cavernous room with arching stone and forbidden windows while a small man adopted a monotone for the better part of a

villainous hour.

From Page 452

In the endless grey of London, I missed the colours and tastes of my homeland. I found bread and meat uninteresting and unpalatable and I wondered how it was that people who sailed the oceans and ruled the world cared nothing for food and how to prepare it.

Londoners ate hardly any fruit at all. I missed the bananas, limes oranges and pineapples of Sierra Leone. I especially missed the malaguetta peppers....

Gail Anderson-Dargatz, her words about this novel;

A novel that should be sung rather than read. It is a song of worship, in praise of the taste of an orange, the smell of a newborn; and it is a lament to the horrors we are capable of inflicting on each other, no matter what colour of our skin.