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I just got back from spending about forty minutes wandering around in the outdoor environmental study area on campus, where they have planted all native Californian species in different sections of Channel Islands, redwoods, grassland, chaparral, foothill woodlands, desert, and wetlands. Besides easily identifiable old friends like madrone and manzanita, it turns out that mugwort and sweetgrass are native (who knew?) and now that I've seen a redwood and a sequoia right next to each other, I finally know what's different about a sequoia. There is a saguaro cactus in the desert area, which was pretty weird. I think all cacti look totally like alien life-forms or something, but this thing was well over twice as tall as I am, a few feet thick, and of course green and spiny. It reminded me of the Venusian pickle from It Conquered the World.
It was a pleasant sense of losing time, wandering around in there. I wasn't wearing a watch so I had no idea what time it was or how long I was taking, and I didn't care. I didn't have any sense that time was at all important. It took me about two circuits to see all the plants they had labelled and cover all the paths. It felt much bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, like some kind of floral Tardis. This area is right outside the Kirsch Center for Environmental Studies, which is the only building on campus designed to showcase "environmentally friendly" design, energy use and materials (and the only one, I think, to have openable windows, I might add, to take advantage of the natural night-cooling available in our local climate).
It was a pleasant sense of losing time, wandering around in there. I wasn't wearing a watch so I had no idea what time it was or how long I was taking, and I didn't care. I didn't have any sense that time was at all important. It took me about two circuits to see all the plants they had labelled and cover all the paths. It felt much bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, like some kind of floral Tardis. This area is right outside the Kirsch Center for Environmental Studies, which is the only building on campus designed to showcase "environmentally friendly" design, energy use and materials (and the only one, I think, to have openable windows, I might add, to take advantage of the natural night-cooling available in our local climate).
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Date: Sep. 22nd, 2005 11:25 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: Sep. 23rd, 2005 03:19 am (UTC)From:no subject