Winter Wonderland!

Last week I went cross-country skiing up near Meaford.  To be honest, the skiing wasn't very good, 'cause it was still snowing fresh wet snow and the trails were very sticky.  But they'd had more snow than we have, and it was a winter wonderland!  I skiid by myself, got my camera out often, and really enjoyed it.  I think the pictures speak for themselves tonight.

Anyone care for a picnic by the bay?

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The Barn Collective

A few more interesting barns for you today, so I can join The Barn Collective.  And barns are a big part of the landscape around the valley here.

There are actually four barns in this picture, which looks across several fields to the barn in the centre.  It puts the other 3 barn roof lines that you can pick out in odd locations to me, but I know exactly which ones they are along the road.

This slightly telephoto view seems to give the picture an entirely different flavour to me.  Without the fence in the foreground, and with the five different lines of fences and/or trees, it sort of compresses the fields between here and the barn.

Yesterday was a perfect winter day here, bright sun and blue skies, and about -10°C, so I headed out for a ski, but drove some rural roads on my way to the trails, and got some great shots.  This barn still has a few cattle in it, some of which you can see outside in the sun.

This barn, on the other hand, which also still has cattle, was looking a little gloomy on a grey day two weeks ago, and there was a fine dust of snow blowing in the air.  The cattle were sensibly staying inside.

And this one was taken nearly 3 weeks ago, before we really had any snow.  It's near Georgian Bay south of Thornbury, and I liked the view with Blue Mountain in the background.  Nice little old silo too.

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Have you noticed the days getting longer?  I took the dog out for a walk at 5.15 today, and it was still light out 15 minutes later.  That's nearly an hour more daylight than we had on Dec. 22nd, the winter solstice.  And I've heard a Chickadee giving it's spring call ('ham buuurrrger'), and a woodpecker drumming in the distance.  I think the longer days are starting to tune them in to the fact that we're steadily moving toward spring.

I've done fine on my walking/cardio this week, though I'm not bothering you with a daily report.  With 3 cross-country ski outings, each an hour and a half, I've got my full 7 hours in, some of which was pretty good cardio!

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The Barn Collective

The Gardens at Versailles

If the Boboli Gardens in Florence were the start of the great formal Renaissance gardens, the gardens at Versailles were the culmination of nearly two centuries of making gardens bigger and better.  Versailles is so big it is simply overwhelming.

If you wonder how the ideas of the Renaissance Garden in Italy reached France, it was the influence of the Medici family again.  Sisters of various Medici Dukes married kings of France.  Catherine created the Jardins du Tuilleries about 1564 (where the guillotine later stood) and Marie de Medici created this garden at the Palace du Luxembourg after 1612, deliberately copying the Boboli Gardens and Pitti Palace, which were of course her childhood home.

By the time Louis XIV turned 18, (he came to the throne in 1654 at age 11), there were many great formal gardens around France.  With the absolute authority of the monarchy, he decided that he needed to have the biggest and the best!  These are some of the parterres immediately outside the palace.

If you come through the palace and look straight ahead, this is your view.  The entire garden was built so the the sun would set at the end of this vista.  Unfortunately the huge fountain immediately in front of us was under renovation when we were there, but the scale of this garden is just amazing!

If you turn to the left, this is the view, down over the Orangery (yes, many of those are Orange trees), facing south.  Look carefully and you will see that all of those trees are in boxes, boxes now known as Versailles Boxes, and are taken inside the Orangery building over the winter.

And if you turn to the right, there is another view down a wide formal walkway, with fountains in every direction.  This garden is above all about fountains - though there are some flowers in the parterres close to the palace.

The fountains are magnificent, plentiful, and interesting.  I wish I had a video of these.  On select days some fountains play to the sound of music, rising and falling, circling and fading, all in time to the music.  We stood here getting damp for about 15 minutes, and it was the most interesting performance I have ever seen in a garden!

Another view of yet another fountain.  But water supply is a major problem.  It is said that as the King made his promenade around the garden fountains would be turned on and off as he came within sight of them, as the limited water supply would not allow them all to be turned on at once.  Note also though, the people!  There were hundreds of people there, of all ages, even though we were there on a rainy dull day.  I have to give credit to the Frence, who obviously love to visit their gardens.

All the major fountains feature statues, from which the water erupts, and all of those statues relate to ancient Roman and Greek stories.  This is the Apollo Fountain.

Versailles was a clear political demonstration of the absolute power of the French monarchy, and more generally of the need for man to dominate and control the natural world.  Miraculously, it survived the French Revolution, and remains today a fascinating place to visit.  We will leave these anonymous French lovers and all the other visitors, and move on next week to the English Landscape Gardens.

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Fabulous winter day here for a change, cold at -15°C, but bright and sunny.  Got in another ski at the Glenelg Nordic trails, and conditions could not have been better - for either skiing or photography.

The Boboli Gardens

This weekend, we'll visit the Boboli Gardens in Florence and the Gardens of Versailles in Paris.  By the 1400's, the Renaissance was flourishing in Florence, Italy, even while northern Europe still suffered under the Black Death, famine, wars, and plunging populations.  Outstanding new art and architecture marked the city.

Brunelleschi's dome on the great cathedral in Florence is one of the great accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance.  Builders finished the cathedral in the 1400's and couldn't figure out how they were going to build the dome, but Brunelleschi came up with a solution..

It took innovation in building techniques, millions of bricks, and an intuitive understanding of architectural stresses.  The dome has both an inner and outer shell, and it remains the largest masonry dome in the world today!

'David' by Michaelangelo, is probably the most famous sculpture of the times.  It was commissioned not by a wealthy king, but by the merchants of Florence, reflecting the growing monetary economy.  This copy that sits outside the town hall means more to me than the original inside the Academia Gallery, because it's in its appropriate political context.

And across the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno River, the wealthy banking family, the Medicis, bought the Pitti Palace and built the Boboli Gardens.  Built on terraces, like many Italian Renaissance Gardens, the view straight out the back of the palace looks up across a series of terraces, past sculptures and fountains.

The Neptune Fountain 

And cutting at an angle across that view, another wide gravel path lined with statues leads downhill between mature trees and hedges to a large formal pool.

Have you wondered about the flowers?  This garden isn't about flowers.  It's about the glories of ancient Rome and Greece, reproduced here in Florence as a garden.  Above all it's a sculpture garden.

 The Isolletto (Island) and another Neptune Fountain.

My favourite sculpture of the garden, a Triton.  Notice that some fountains aren't running?  Water supply is a serious issue, and not all fountains are turned on at once.

There is even a grotto, a totally manmade fantasy in stone, with allegorical overtones in the statues and decorations.  The Boboli Gardens reflected the growing wealth of the Medici Dukes of Florence, who were not 'kings', as was the case in England, France and Spain, but were bankers.

Tomorrow, Versailles, the great French Renaissance garden.

Sunny Skies - Briefly!

We actually enjoyed a 10 minute "sunny break" to quote the weather forecast today.  There must have been a hole in all those grey clouds overhead and for a brief few minutes we had sun and blue sky.

Didn't have time for more than a backyard picture, but there's that rare January blue sky!  The patches in the snow where the snow's been dug away are deer feeding patches.

They come along, usually overnight, and scrape away the snow on this part of our lawn, to get at the clover in the grass.  We used a lot of clover in with the grass when we planted this part of the lawn, and they seem to like it.

But this morning one of them was still there feeding at dawn, 20 feet outside out bedroom window!

I managed a couple of snaps before it wandered slowly off, though it's through a window that has a screen in it.

Looks like a pretty well fed deer to me!

And once I went outside an hour later, I found deer tracks all over the driveway.  Must have been the usual 5 or 6 of them earlier in the morning.

We'd had a very gentle new snow overnight that left a thin white layer decorating the branches and pine needles.

The clouds stayed grey, and I was out skiing in a snowstorm up near Meaford this afternoon.  They have much more snow than we do; bushes and trees all laden with heavy new snow.  But then we got one more "sunny break", this time just as I was driving past the bay to pick up my wife after her quilting meeting.  And I had a great ski, with more snowy pictures to come sometime!

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Old Bridges/New Bridges

The Beaver Valley features 3 or 4 old bridges over the river in the main part of the valley.  Two of them failed this summer, so only one of the old iron bridges remains carrying traffic - though there's also an old one on a now unused road allowance.

This is the old iron bridge that still carries traffic.  And it's the 'flower bridge' in the summer.  I must try and dig out my pictures of it.

Large hanging baskets of flowers are hung between the uprights of this bridge, contributed by a nearby garden centre.  Good reason to love this old bridge, part of our township's heritage.  I love the criss-cross iron work.

This is the other old bridge still spanning the river.  It's only used by snowmobiles and pedestrians officially, but I suspect hunters occasionally drive in here.  I like the old rivets holding these bridges together.

I drove down another sideroad to see the new bridge that has replaced one of the older ones, just about 3 weeks ago.  The road was closed for about 8 months.  And at the moment I had to wait for the snowplow, who had to raise his wing-blade just to get through the bridge.

Here's the old bridge before it was condemned, taken when we canoed down the river last spring.  Look closely and you can see those old rivets.

This is the new bridge, no rivets in sight, all welded steel construction.  The old bridge was lifted out in one piece by a huge crane, and this bridge, built elsewhere arrived on one side of the river on a huge truck, which had to back down about a mile of valley sideroad to get in position.

A crane was waiting on the other side of the river, and slowly they inched the bridge off the truck, the crane holding the other end up, until they had it in place across the river.  I wish I had been there to see it!  I don't know what the wooden pieces are, maybe something they have to finish next spring.

This is a another new but much smaller bridge at Slabtown, further downstream, where they similarly brought in a crane and lifted it into place in one piece.  I've actually seen a video of that operation - really neat!

And there was one other old bridge that I believe actually collapsed last spring, and was replaced.  A quite different style of construction.

The deck is vertical 2x8 boards, but somebody didn't bother taking the price tags off all the boards!  Old bridges are an interesting bit of our landscape, but now there's only one of the really old ones left in use.

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Been busy, both trying to get out on snowshoes or skiis, and doing my Life Long Learning Series, which seems to be going very well, even though it's taking a lot of work.  I got more than my target 1 hour/day of walking/snowshoeing/skiing in last week, and so far this week I'm doing well.  Enjoyed a brisk 1.5 hour ski today on the Glenelg trails with another group, and the trails were in excellent condition!  I'm anxious to go back by myself with my camera.

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Tuesday's Treasures