Year in Pictures in Review: Part 1 (April Through July)

Back in March, I started this blog because I so loved the neighborhood photo essays in Chuck B.'s Whoreticulture blog. Every day I'd show my admiration through tipsy responses to his posts about Bernal Heights in San Francisco, and soon I decided my flattery needed to be even more sincere, so I ripped off his blog and started this one.

In fact, this very post is based on an idea I stole from him.

MARCH

This was before I started uploading my photos to Flickr, so the pictures all look like crap. I won't bother reposting any of them here. However, I'll reprint my winning entry from a dirty limerick contest at a gay St. Patrick's Day birthday party I attended that month:

Our friend Sonny's exceedingly hot
The boys they all like him a lot
And the girls, how they sigh
With a tear in their eye
When they find out he doesn't like twat

APRIL

April was the month that I started taking lots of pictures of Georgetown.



April was also the month that I started stalking Ciscoe Morris. This is not really true. I just like taking pictures of his planting strip.



This is not a particularly good or interesting photo, but it features the plant genus that I have been obsessed with this year. Whenever I see it in bloom, I'm stunned by just how blue it is. Ceanothus!



MAY

This month it seems like I did nothing but take pictures of the darling buds of May.

Joy Creek Nursery in Scappoose, Oregon.





My yard.



And Ciscoe's yard, of course.







Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited Rich Art's yard in Centralia.







JUNE

In June, the Georgetown dump proposal was killed.

I took more pictures Ciscoe's yard.





Beacon Hill held its first garden walk.





And Georgetown had a carnival.







JULY

July was a month of firsts.

I learned how to use the closeup button on my point-and-shoot.





I visited Hartstene Island and spent over $30 on a bottle of wine.



I toured the Rainier Cold Storage Building.



We built a handsome little fence.



And we went to Toronto for no good reason.

Kubota Garden

Kubota Garden is an old Japanese garden here in South Seattle. It's huge, it's free, it's in a bad neighborhood. It's supposedly haunted. Everything about it is unlikely.



From the garden's website:

In 1927 Fujitaro Kubota bought five acres of logged-off swampland in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle and began his garden. A 1907 emigrant from the Japanese Island of Shikoku, he established the Kubota Gardening Company in 1923. Fujitaro was a man with a dream. Entirely self-taught as a gardener, he wanted to display the beauty of the Northwest in a Japanese manner and was soon designing and installing gardens throughout the Seattle area.

Enough talk. Let's look.