Skip to main content

Grapevine Botanic Garden

For some reason our photos this year wound up being dumped in one large folder, imaginatively entitled 2012.  Nine months into the year, I finally have been getting around to categorising them, and thereby discovering a few blog posts I should have written.  This is one.


Grapevine Botanic Gardens is not on the scale of its Fort Worth or Dallas counterparts, being more of a glorified park, but a very pretty one nonetheless.  We first went there on a sunny Saturday earlier this year, after driving past the signpost many times, and it was packed with people taking bridal photos and picnicking on the grass.  We've been a few times since then, and every time Toby heads straight for the fountain with the handy toddler-height overflow.




Once we manage to detach him from that, the next stop is usually the pretty little pond system with footbridges, splashy waterfalls, and huge spotty fish.  On our latest visit we noticed a little snake nestled comfortably under a rock, too.





That was the time there were lizards everywhere, as well.  Green ones, brown ones, puffy-throated ones...  We watched with fascination as a male ever-so-slowly stalked a female through the branches of a plant.  Usually when we see a lizard it's, "oh look, there's a ..." rustle rustle rustle as it disappears into some leaves.  I had never seen one move so deliberately.







One of my favourite parts is this plant wall, with windowboxes forming a cascade of vegetation.  It looks like an ideal thing to jazz up a bare garden wall.  They also have a vertical arrangement which creates a very compact herb garden.  I'd love to try it one day!




Just over the road is Nash Farm, a modest plot of land containing a 19th century farmhouse and assorted farming paraphernalia.  Recently it hosted an Italian car show, where Lamborghinis lazed under the live oaks and Alfa Romeos rested next to rusty tractors.  Graham ogled the sports cars and dreamed about selling the house to buy a Ferrari, while Toby and I hung out on the porch and sipped lemonade in the sunshine. Everyone was happy!







Comments

Martha said…
Just to clarify Hon, if you're thinking the bottom photo's a Ferrari (just coz it's red), it isn't- it's a 1972 De Tomaso Pantera! Hubby
Martha said…
I wasn't even going to attempt to identify those car photos! If you're interested in that kind of thing you will know what they are.

Popular posts from this blog

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks!  I learnt a new word today!  I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian .  Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist.  Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials.  All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal.  That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter.  So why the need for a fancy new word?  Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal.  But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course.  The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Thirsting

When the poor and needy seek water,      and there is none,      and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them;      I the God of Israel will not forsake them.   I will open rivers on the bare heights,      and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water,      and the dry land springs of water. Isaiah 41:17-18