from atop warwick castle
 

kind of a neat picture i took from a tower at warwick castle during my recent trip to england. it loses a bit of detail at small size, so heres a larger version. while we took a lot of pictures on our kodak digital, most of them wont be of any interest to anyone but us. if i find any other good ones though, ill be sure to post them.

http://www.sugarbead.com/personal/vacation/warwick.jpg

here is a picture of me, for those with strong stomaches.

~james

Huzzah!
Love that lush green and the gardens are lovely. I wanna go.

Cool picture of English gardens. Are they private residences or part of the castle complex?

private gardens. but they are right up against the castle grounds and just to the left of the picture is a major shopping area, so it is an affluent area.

they are pretty, arent they? i plan on basing my garden as much as reasonably possible on images like this.

~james

If you ever want to talk garden design or plant selection, lemme know, cause I am obsessed.:)

Ah, the Pagan rituals I could hold in a garden like those...sigh.

So I was digging and moving a purple flowering perennial, because "gardening is the slowest of the performing arts" and I asked my spouse if he liked where I had put it. (He humors this behavior on a regular basis because its "my department".) anyway, he nodded his approval of the purple and asked what the plant name was. I gave him the Latin name. He laughed and replied in his best echoey announcer voice, " Now batting for the Red Sox...the shortstop.....Campanula Glomerata."

One of the things I found most fascinating when I visited England was the absolutely perfect grass. Every lawn was like a putting green, from the largest estate to the smallest plot outside the high-density suburban London flats.

Makes you want to go back over with a handful of crabgrass seeds as revenge, does it?

I imagine if I did that I would be severely pummeled.

So..where are all of the hobbits?:D

It goes with the constant rain. Seattle is like that too.

We've had constant frickin' rain here in NC since last fall and our grass looks nothing - nothing - like it. All the rain does is make everything, weeds included, grow more.

A component of my amazement includes the fact that all the grass and gardens we saw were so well-groomed. I wish I could whip my neighbors into shape about that ....

Whoa nellie! Back the fuck up! You want to dictate to your neighbors how they should keep their grounds? You're in the wrong country.:eek:

When the grass (actually weeds) is a foot high and there is trash all over, yeah, I would like to make some suggestions ... especially after the fire that happened over there a few weeks ago. Due to all the dead brush that was never cleared away after the ice storm in December. Apparently someone tossed a cigarette butt or something out their window whilst passing by. I wasn't real happy to come home and see the fire department putting out a fire only feet from my own house.

Was the fire on your property or is the house close to the property line?

It was on their property. That's where all the brush was. Fortunately the FD got there before it spread to anyone else's.

Oh, BTW, while this is a bit off the subject, the first thing I thought of when I read this:

was that you were unfamiliar with the concept of homeowner's associations, which can and do tell people what they can and can't do with their property, frequently to a highly ridiculous degree. They seem to be more common in the South, and in newer housing developments. We made sure when we bought our house that there wasn't an HOA there due to all the horror stories we'd heard from friends who had to deal with them.

Of course, the one (and only, as far as I can tell) downside to not having an HOA is that if a neighbor wants to treat their yard like a landfill there's not much to be done about it unless health or safety is at stake and you can prove it to the city/county.

Here's a thread on another board about just how stupid HOAs can be:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...hreadid=198416

heres another one. its not a great image, unless you count the ghostly visage of HELL in the top right corner!

http://www.sugarbead.com/personal/sp...sion_small.jpg
heres a detail:
http://www.sugarbead.com/personal/sp...ion_detail.jpg
now i see a kewpie doll, its mouth agape screaming in untold horror. what do you see?

yes, i know theres a logical explanation. and that explanation is that i was using a flash and it bounced off the plexiclass covering and protecting the bookcases (you can barely see it if you look in certain parts). but i thought it was kind of neat that i finally got a picture of a genuine fake ghost. i had toyed with the idea a while back of making my own ghost images, just for fun. but i think i like travelling abroad and taking copious amounts of random pictures instead.

larger image here, for those who are interested. the people in the picture are wax figures, not more ghosts.

~james

Wow - that's both cool and creepy at the same time!

Oh yes, very familiar. Wouldn't buy into one of those for love nor money. Even without them, there are plenty of folks around that know better what their neighbors should and shouldn't do with their property. I haven't mowed my lawn for 8 years for just that very reason. Now they're sorry they pissed me off.:p