A soft coat for old wood

An old stump in Victoria, where it's warm and wet most of the winter, sports a full crop of turkey tail fungus.

One side of the stump. It's like that all the way around.

These are young turkey tails, still clean and pale coloured, still quite small. I don't know what kind of tree this was; a backyard shade tree, on the small side, cut to knee height.

One of the new stems of the shrub next to it had pierced a turkey tail. Or otherwise, the tail had captured the stem.

The mushroom looks fragile, but I couldn't pull the stem out of its grasp. To separate these two new friends, stump and shrub, now will take a knife.

The surface of the fungus feels velvety. Zooming in closer, I can see why:

Fuzzy

Zooming closer:

A warm winter coat for a dying leaf.

An opportunity lost.

I made a quick trip to Victoria, for a birthday party. We were early, so we stopped for supper beside the Inner Harbour, and afterwards walked to the Parliament Buildings and back. It was chilly, but that just makes the lights shine brighter.

Parliament Buildings, Victoria

The blue lighting on the water behind the boats is the old Undersea Gardens, an underwater aquarium that allowed visitors to view marine life in situ. I was disappointed to read later, that it is now closed, after almost 50 years of operation. I always meant to visit, and never got around to it. My mistake.

Beacon Hill Park

(We are going through envelopes of Laurie's old photos, in the pre-blogging days, having good ones loaded onto my hard drive. Periodically, I will be posting some of these. Today, for example:)

These are from Victoria's Beacon Hill Park, around the year 2000.

I recognize the site, but it still looks to me like something out of a fantasy novel; no real place could look that stylized! Even the pigeons look posed.

That large, greyish bird across the stream is a white peacock. Here, I'll have him turn around for you:


I don't know if this is a breed, or if he's albino. (With a tint of pink. Some hanky-panky with flamingos back in his ancestry?)










It's hard work, keeping our enthusiastic B.C. vegetation cropped and shaven and orderly.

And everybody needs a nap sometime.

Tomorrow: back to the real world. Rainy days, mud and weeds. And hopefully, a duck or two.