4th of July Flowers

Summer flowers starting to open in the garden.

The Roman Cabinet

Cabinet inlaid with "hard stones" (pietre dure) made in Rome in the 17th century and owned for a long time by the Borghese family. They kept it until the 1820s, when it was sold to a dealer in England. Who sold it to King George IV, and it remained in the British royal family until they sold it in 1959.

It was purchased last year by the Getty for $2.8 million, and they have now put it on display. If you want to see it in fabulous detail, The History Blog has a 55 MB image file.

Oaxaca Botanical Garden

The Ethnobotanical Garden in Oaxaca, Mexico was a monastery in colonial times, and later it became a military post. Then in 1992 the military pulled out and after a long debate the government decided to hand the property over to a group of local artists and activists to create this garden.

The garden emphasizes native plants, and especially those that were used by native peoples.

In colonial times the most valuable product of this region was a dye made from these tiny Cochineal insects, worth more than its weight in gold. The Spanish kept trying to establish these insects in other regions but it never worked.

The Ethno- part of the garden includes sections planted in the main local crops, using traditional techniques.

Ruined section of the colonial monastery, incorporated into the garden.

Seems like a lovely place. Unfortunately they have had so much trouble with people stealing or damaging their rare plants that they no longer let people just wander around, and the only way to see it is as part of a tour.

Solar Panels at the Community College

I was doing one of my parental duties yesterday, teaching another child to drive. The traditional place to practice driving in my neighborhood is the parking lots of the Community College of Baltimore County, which as you can see from this Google Earth aerial are extensive. On Sundays they are nearly empty.

I hadn't been there in about two years, so I was rather startled to discover that they now look like this. Constellation Energy has put up these "solar carports" at three CCBC campuses, with a total output of 5.1 megawatts. They cover about half of the parking lot array in the aerial photo. I discovered that they have actually been there for about 18 months, so Google needs to get cracking on keeping Earth up to date. Presumably they aren't worried about updating the images for southwestern Baltimore County because nothing ever happens here. Ha!

My son and I differed about the effect. He said he found them "oppressive." I rather liked them, because especially in summer what I find oppressive is acres of asphalt exposed to the burning sun. Shade is good. Shade from solar carports is not as nice as shade from trees, but better than nothing. And I would much rather solar panels go up over parking lots than over green fields. In fact I think a goal of covering all the big surface parking lots in America with solar carports makes sense.

(Baltimore Sun photo, taken on a day when it wasn't about to storm and probably not by holding a phone out the window of a moving car.)

This seems to be the future. But note the scale of this. To power our civilization with the sun means devoting a lot of acreage to solar panels. This installation felt big to me, but CCBC estimates that over 20 years it will only supply 27% of their energy needs. This is why I think we will never get to anything like 100% solar power, or 100% solar + wind. It just takes too much space. We need other approaches: natural gas for the next few decades, then hydro, nuclear, eventually fusion, and maybe especially more effort on saving energy. I have posted here before about technologies that make houses and office buildings energy neutral (they produce as much power as they use, from quite small solar arrays), and we need to keep working harder in that direction.

Jeffrey Bale's Pebble Mosaics

California-based artist who works around the world. This is probably his most famous work, the Tree of Life fountain.

Earth, Fire and Fire from mosaics of the elements he installed in New Zealand.

Prayer rug.

Solstice fountain.

Labyrinth

Others. Bale has a blog on which he occasionally posts photo sets, some of his own work and more of things he has seen around the world.

Birth Rates

Census data from 2016 shows that for the first time, American women in their 30s had more babies than women in their 20s. The peak demographic for childbirth is now 30-34. This might be the first time in human history that this has been true. Overall, 3.9 million babies were born in the US last year.

The birth rate for teenage girls in the US has fallen 51 percent since 2007; it is now 20.3 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19.

San Juan de Gaztelugatxe

Gaztelugatxe is a small island off the Basque coast in the Bay of Biscay.

These days it is connected to the mainland by a narrow path that includes a two-arched bridge and one of those staircases with an undeterminable number of steps; so far this morning I have seen every number between 229 and 241.

At the peak of the island  is a  hermitage dating to the 9th century. Opinions differ as to the date of the current building, but some say 11th century.

The hermitage is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. Some say the name of the island refers to him, as if “Gaztelugatxe” were the Basque word for "Baptist." But wikipedia says it means something like "craggy fort" or "inaccessible strong place."

The first certain historical record of the hermitage comes from 1053, when the island was donated to a monk by the name of Zianno, apparently the abbot of the monastery of San Juan de La Peña in Huesca, by a Navarrese couple, Doña Tota Ortiz and Lieutenant Eneko López. But it was already by then an "old" or "ancient" place, and archaeologists have found the graves of monks dating back to the 9th century.

The place entered secular history during the fourteenth century while Alfonso XI, King of Castile was subjugating the Kingdom of Pamplona. In 1334 Juan Núñez de Lara, Lord of Bizkaia, defied Alfonso's army from this spot with (the story has it) only seven knights. The seven knights held out for forty days, after which the Castilians gave up and went elsewhere.

The place was taken and sacked by Sir Francis Drake in 1593. Drake is always referred to in Spanish sources as "the pirate Drake," which is what he pretty much was even though the English remember him differently. Just a year later the place was taken again by Huguenot sailors serving the King of France; after burning the hermitage they threw the hermit off the cliff.

If you visit there now you may be told that the place once belonged to the Templars, but so far as I can tell that is a myth. Really, not every cool religious site has Templar connections.

The most devoted followers of the shrine in modern times have been sailors, and the chapel contains main ex-votos they have left in thanks for surviving shipwrecks and storms. In the summer the place has many visitors. Sadly it is closed in the winter, so you cannot come out on a cold windswept day and imagine the hard lives of the 9th-century monks who came here to suffer for God.