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…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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5 responses to “Monthly Picture: Echinacea”
Reminds me of Xanadu, the fictional estate of Charles Foster Kane of the film Citizen Kane.
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…
“(pumped) waterfalls”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_de_Marly
One of the waterfalls reportedly has eight pumps, so they can tune the deluge for best effect.
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