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Japantown

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Sausage tree, baobab now official arboretum trees

Sausage tree.

Towering tropical trees, from ulu (breadfruit) to rainbow shower, amaze me every time I visit the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus here in Honolulu. “It’s like a botanical garden,” I was just saying yesterday. Today, the local newspaper announced that the campus has just received international accreditation as an arboretum: one of only 135 in the world!

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Momentous, monumental trees

Do you like big, old trees? Well, you can find 22,446 big and old trees (with more posted every day) on the amazing international Monumental Trees website. My colleague, the writer and literary translator Isabel Cole, posted some great Berlin trees from the site today, and I knew I had to share this resource with you. monumentaltrees.com

Above: a giant black poplar in a graveyard in Berlin-Friedrichshain at Landsberger Allee and Friedenstraße. This graveyard used to be my backyard.

Have fun combing the website for big trees in your area, or making a virtual world tour of momentous trees. Do post the link below if you find any special specimens.

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Right through the fence: disruptive plant in San Francisco

 

This fenced-in plant “looks like it wants to escape its enclosure,” writes Megan Mock, who wrote in response to our post on a banana tree invading a bathroom.

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Aggressive orchids on Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i

So this is what can happen when orchids aren’t confined to a pot. At the home where I recently stayed in Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i, the palm tree in the front yard was completely wrapped in the roots of these orchid plants.

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She came in through the bathroom window — Kauai, Hawai‘i, USA

A large green organism reached through a bathroom window in Kauai today, startling Urban Plant Research contributor Marko Förstel. The scientist, who is visiting Kauai for an academic conference, quickly snapped a picture to share with us. Further inspection revealed that the green being was a banana tree. Thank you, Marko, for sharing this cheeky Kauai resident. Bathroom visitors, beware!

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Mysteriously multiplying Christmas trees in Brooklyn

“How did my seven-unit building produce ten dumped trees? Don’t ‘miracle of Christmas’ me, Brooklyn, you’ve got some explaining to do,” says playwright and keen-eyed New Yorker Mike Lew.

Any theories?

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Plants in the art of Florian Bong-Kil Grosse

Last week, I saw this photo at Tête, an artist-run gallery in Berlin. It’s part of an exhibition of new work by Florian Bong-Kil Grosse and Unn Fahlstrøm, on view through Sunday. Though Florian’s work in the show is not primarily about plants — it is a series of observations about the way people live in Korean cities — in several images, the photographer’s eye for plants is clear.

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San Francisco sidewalks: steep, lush, vivid, wacky

When the fog lifts from gray San Francisco and Indian summer sun floods the up-and-down streets, the plants and buildings suddenly show their true colors in all their vividness. Some plants are painted on, others are trimmed into submission, while others grow into their own forms, whether creating sidewalk tunnels or two-dimensional trees. Here’s a little photo walk around San Francisco’s Mission and Noe Valley neighborhood back when the sun was shining.

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Berlin-Neukölln: Kindergarten garden

Some of Berlin’s best windows are Kindergarten windows. Unlike the kindergarten denoted by US English, which is part of primary school, a German Kindergarten or Kindertagestätte (Kita for short) is a pre-school day care. If the windows are any indication, a major part of Kindergarten here is decorating the rooms with cheery plants and animals—putting the Garten in Kindergarten and more urban plants on our sidewalks.

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