Good morning, gardeners. I hate to say it, but my home garden is a mess. I am still getting a few tomatoes, but most of the garden is thigh high in weeds. It is quite amazing what will happen to a garden when it is left to its own devices for over 7 weeks. Since I did a lot of traveling this spring and summer, I thought that I would post some pictures of the flowers and gardens that I saw.
Since my youngest son completed all his college courses in December, we were able to take a vacation over spring break for the first time in about 30 years. We took a walking tour of Portugal, since I had always wanted to visit that country. On the second day we took a 5 mile walk around one of the Portuguese estuaries. Here are some of the flowers that were in bloom:
It was a wonderful time to be in southern Portugal. the weather was warm, but not too hot, and many of the spring flowers were in full bloom:
Our vacation in Portugal was short, although we did walk about 64 miles altogether. I had to return to finish teaching zooarchaeology and Irish archaeology in the second half of the spring semester.
We attended the ICAANE (International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East) in Basel, Switzerland in early June. We presented a paper on our work in Turkey, and blue jersey dad hobbled around since he injured his back just before we left. Here is a picture of some of the flowers in the market near the town square:
We took out family vacation to Tokyo in late June. It was at the top of everyone's bucket list. My kids wanted to see the electronics and the weird night life, and bjd and I wanted to see the gardens and the historic sites. When we were there, the hydrangea and the irises were in bloom:
And here is a picture of the koi in the pond at the imperial palace gardens:
As most of you know, dad and I did 7 weeks of field and lab work in Turkey and Belgium this summer. We spent most of our time identifying animal bones, but we were able to see a bit of Belgium on the last weekend of our trip. Here are can see flowers growing on one of the graves at the British WW1 cemetery near Ieper (Ypres):
And here is a picture of the wonderful Sunday morning flower market in Gent:
We are now back home. I am back teaching, and we will be weeding out my garden until Christmas.