Flowers that grow on Olympus

If you lie on your back and look straight up, you’ll see that the zenith, the overhead-point, is now in the middle of Cygnus, by the star Gamma Cygni where the Swan’s wings cross his body.

There appear to be cracks in the roof of tje sky.  That’s because my program that draws these scenes gets the graded color and brightness by calculating for thousands of small pieces of sky, and I didn’t make them overlap quite enough in an area beyond the zenith that doesn’t usually have to be drawn.

A zenith on Earth

Botanic gardens: each time we visit one – Brooklyn, Kew, Krakow in Poland – I think “This is the best!”  Well, the best is Oxford’s, which we visited for at least a third time on July 17.

We didn’t know that the day was almost the 400th anniversary of the botanic garden, Britain’s oldest, founded on 25 July 1621 as a “physic” garden of medicinal herbs.  It is shifting its educational emphasis toward Mediterranean flora, because, with global heating and the northward creep of climatic zones, that may be England’s destiny.

One of the new (I think) features is a row of beds devoted to orders of plants: Rosales, Fabales (including the pea or legume family), and so on.  Another series is geographical.  Turkey; we learned that it is the most diverse, because of its contrasting environments.  And Mount Olympus.

Mount Olympus!  Up there, where tread the gods, grow numerous species, many of them endemic, fifty orchids. And behind the informative signboard, in the plot between neat corridors of grass, you see them.

Here is Olympus against the sky.

There are three peaks along the mountain wall that separates Thessaly, Greece’s broad northern region, from the Aegean Sea: Olympus, Ossa, Pelion.  That’s Ossa in the foreground.  Pelion (scene of the wedding feast that led to the Trojan war) is underneath you.  Between Olympus and Ossa is the Vale of Tempe, the nymph-haunted glen through which the rivers of Thessaly get out to the sea.

The giants Otus and Ephialtes, who grew a cubit broader and a fathom taller every year, piled Pelion on Ossa and Ossa on Olympus to attack the gods, who were saved by a dove: as it flew between the giants, they flung their spears at it and transfixed each other.

When I was cycling in Greece, I rode a few miles with a fellow who had rigged a second set of handlebars (he could have called it Ossa) on top of the first, so as to be able to sit up and ease his back on the long trips he made around his country.  He had ridden up the road that zigzags almost to the top of Olympus.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.