Anne Elliott's photos with the keyword: Dorothy Harvie Gardens

Saw this Castor Bean plant growing outside at the Calgary Zoo on 1st October. "The castor bean plant, Ricinus communis, is a "native of tropical Africa cultivated in several varieties for the oil found in its leaves and for its bold foliage."(Alber and Alber) The "stalked leaves consist of usually eight radiating, pointed leaflets with slightly serrated edges and prominent central veins. Many varieties are green, but some are reddish brown."(Cooper and Johnson) The flowers are green and inconspicuous, but pink or red in the pigmented varieties. Many stamens are near the base and branching pistils are near the top of the flower. The soft-spined fruits containing attractively mottled seeds are distinctive features of the plant. It is grown as an ornamental in gardens, sometimes as a houseplant, and also grows as a weed. It is an annual in the south and a perennial in the tropics, and it may reach "15 feet tall outdoors". It is a woody herb belonging to the family of Euphorbiacea (Spurge). The seeds from the castor bean plant, Ricinus communis, are poisonous to people, animals and insects. Castor beans are pressed to extract castor oil which is used for medicinal purposes." From www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/castorbean .

One of my favourite flowers is Echinacea. Love these beautiful white ones that were growing in the garden at the Calgary Zoo on 9 August 2012. Are any of you having the same problem on Flickr as I've had for the last three days? When I click on one of my photos to open that photo page, no other photos show up at the right hand side of the page, where usually several thumbnails of my most recent photos show up (below the map area). At first, instead of thumbnail photos, all I could see were squares with a tiny green icon iside. Now all I get is an empty square for my most recently posted photo, followed by empty space where the other photos should be. If I click on the right arrow, I eventually come to a thumbnail that is actually a photo. Exactly the same thing happens when I open other people's photo pages - their most recent photos do not show up on the right hand side of a photo page. I don't even know if my photos are showing up anywhere - maybe people are only seeing "blanks"? This has been mentioned in the Help Forum by a few other people, but nothing has been done to fix it - yet. Really beginning to annoy me, as well as making me feel very unmotivated. Message, below, just received about this problem. However, it still isn't fixed for my photostream! "On Thursday, we made some infrastructure changes to parts of our Farm3 which caused these broken thumbnails. Farm3 was running on some hardware and storage that's no longer up to standard. The new setup is faster and all around better but we made a mistake with some of the configuration. We have since fixed the thumbnail problem. If anyone is still experiencing this problem, please post in this thread the link to the Flickr page that shows the problem. Please include your physical location - country or USA state is enough detail. Flickr is growing and we're trying to stay ahead of the technical demands on our infrastructure. We'll continue to upgrade parts of our farms and threads like this one keep us honest. We apologize for this mistake and are thankful for your help. * * * John"

This was a fine display in the Dorothy Harvie Garden at the Calgary Zoo. These Ornamental Cabbages always fascinate me, especially the white ones because they seem to have a sprinkling of tiny green hearts around the edges of the leaves. Taken on 25 September 2012.

This spectacular plant was growing in a row with others at the Calgary Zoo, when I went for the day on Saturday with friends from England, Linda and Tony. I love the spiny, red fruits, which contain large, oval, shiny, bean-like, highly poisonous seeds with variable brownish mottling. The sunlight, unfortunately, was extremely harsh on everything. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil_plant

I had no idea that there were so many varieties of Iris until I visited the Calgary Zoo's gardens.