Echinacea
Mary took me along on a Master Gardener tour of the plantings at Quaker Hill Native Plant Gardens (*) in Pawling, NY. We saw plenty of good-looking plants with enough light to make hand-held pictures come out wonderfully well, at least when my other mistakes canceled out.
This is an Echinacea, part of a much larger planting.
It’s cropped from the original image, resized slightly to 1050×1680, and now serves as a screen backdrop on the portrait monitor.
(*) The owners are among the 100 richest people in the country, so a staff of 70 maintaining the estate seems perfectly normal. Over the last two decades, they reshaped the entire 400-odd acre landscape to make the property look exactly right, to the extent that the many (synthetic) cliffs & (pumped) waterfalls consist of enormous boulders that a stone dresser reassembled and blended together from the largest sections that could be trucked in. The water features are visible from low earth orbit…
#1 by Aki on 15-July-2012 - 11:26
Reminds me of Xanadu, the fictional estate of Charles Foster Kane of the film Citizen Kane.
#2 by Ed on 15-July-2012 - 11:49
Zoom in on that satellite view, look down near the south (bottom of your monitor) end of the “lake”, and you’ll see the house. Part of it, anyway: the living area adds up to 65,000-some-odd square feet. Our entire property isn’t much bigger than that and our house would fit in their pool.
Remember: this is their country estate which they visit a few weeks each year. The staff keeps it on low idle and revs it up as needed.
At least for me, that whole lifestyle might as well be fictional…
#3 by Aki on 16-July-2012 - 00:52
“(pumped) waterfalls”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_de_Marly
#4 by Ed on 16-July-2012 - 07:16
One of the waterfalls reportedly has eight pumps, so they can tune the deluge for best effect.