Pollinator Plants at Leach Botanical Garden

17Here begins a series of scenes at that hidden east side Portland gem, the Leach Botanical Garden.

There's an upper area and a lower area. The geography places it along the brow of the gully that Johnson Creek cascades down before adopting a more leisurely course going west from the Lents area of Southeast Portland. This part was on the upper area and was in deliciously bright sunlight.

Click on each photo to embiggen.

Along the start of the pollinator walk.

Closeup on some pollinator blossoms

Lovely light blue blossoms. The scent was wonderful.

Even More!

One of the things I adore about plants is the way some take the light an multiply it. They don't become brighter, though, but more luminous. More vivid.

Watercolor works the same way. 

The Willamette Not-Valley

8There's a difference in tone and atmosphere between the part of the Willamette Valley around Portland and the rest of it.

Oregon's Willamette Valley is mostly broad and rolling, with undulating areas of hills and rural farmland that seem to go on forever, and then the foothills of the Coast Range and Cascades happen. As the river bends east before going north again, at Newberg Pool (they actually call it this), it's sinuosity is constrained by hills on each side. As Hwy 99E hugs the river from Canby north into Oregon City, it seems a different place entirely, still Oregon but somehow in a different state entirely.

It's in the Willamette drainage, but, somehow, it's not part of the Willamette Valley. Not really.

As seen from I-205 southbound in West Linn

I mean, I'm not Philip Jose Farmer, but if I were, this would inspire me to write Riverworld. 

Maybe that this is the oldest part of the community we modernly call the State of Oregon, maybe that has something to do with it.