My mother's daughter

While in Ohio I didn't get much walking in but I'm trying to add up steps again on my my pedometer in the mornings before anyone else is awake. I walk down to my old high school (I never made the walk when I was a high school student!) and then through a residential area and then up into the hills around my brother's house. All in all about an hour's walk and I probably get more exercise (when I do it) than on my flat walk around the rice fields in Japan. Of course I'm stuffing myself with too good food, so this is only token calorie control but it is better than nothing.

I took the camera with me today and captured some native Southern California flora. I don't know what some of these plants are but they are nothing like I see in Japan so I'm showing them. You can see how dry it is around the roads but the yards and tended areas of the neighborhood are quite green and lucious looking. Some of the flowering trees around here obviously don't need much water to thrive.

Mexican sage along the roadside and close-up.

A species of Bottle Brush but there are other shapes of the same type of flowers elsewhere along the road.

Ever present California palm trees.

Interesting dried weeds.

We're guessing that these are Jacaranda trees (don't know how to spell that). Every single time we drive past some of these purple trees my mother says "Aren't those pretty? Those must be Jacaranda don't you think?"

Wild orange trees and this is appropriate because the city my brother lives in is called "XXX, the City of Oranges."

This morning when I got back from my walk I started wading through the PILES of papers and pictures that litter the floor and desk and table in my mother's house, and I discovered that most of the pictures that my mother has taken in the past few years are pictures of her garden and flowers and cut flowers that she had stuffed into vases. Sorry, but once you've seen a rose you've seen a rose and certainly she didn't need hundreds of pictures of flowers and trees. People and activities spark much more interest in the viewer. But then I looked at the pictures I was planning to post today and realized that I really am my mother's daughter with all these plant pictures I've taken.

Sorry about that...