Annual flowers always look their best right before the first frost gets them.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked).
-
A Preview of the Fall Flower Show at Phipps
The Fall Flower Show officially opens this Saturday, but you can watch the installation as it progresses. More than half is already in place.
This year’s show has a Japanese theme, and it probably will not spoil your enjoyment of it to reveal that chrysanthemums will be involved.
Most of the chrysanthemums have not quite opened yet. The ones in the Serpentine Room are just beginning to show their faces.
The Sunken Garden is all dug up, and cartloads of new plants are rolling in.
Camera: Olympus E-20n.
-
Black Squirrel
Black squirrels seem to be multiplying in Squirrel Hill and Schenley Park. This one was browsing for acorns in the Homewood Cemetery.
The black squirrel is the same species as the gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis); it is described as a “melanistic” phase, meaning that it has more of the dark pigment melanin. There is also a very rare white phase (a true phase, not albinism) of Sciurus carolinensis, but Father Pitt has never seen a white squirrel in Pittsburgh. The white phase is so rare, in fact, that each of its widely scattered habitats seems to regard itself as the only place in the world where white squirrels live. Father Pitt has seen them in Queenstown, Maryland, where they are a famous local sight.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
-
Center for Sustainable Landscapes, Phipps Conservatory
The Center for Sustainable Landscapes is housed in “one of earth’s greenest buildings.” It’s worth taking a tour to see the various clever ways the building makes use of renewable energy and resources.
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
-
Phipps Hall of Botany
The Hall of Botany is a work of Rutan & Russell in an unusual baroque style.1
Cameras: above, Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS; below, Olympus E-20n.
- In an earlier version of this article, we had attributed the Hall of Botany to Alden & Harlow, following online references. However, a newspaper article from December 17, 1900, just before the work began, tells us, “The architects of the building are Messrs. Rutan & Russell.” “Germ Idea of Henry Phipps School of Botany Belongs to Miss Annie M. Deens, Teacher of Biology,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, December 17, 1900, p. 5, where a rendering and plan of the building is printed. ↩︎
-
King Edward Apartments, Oakland
This is not the largest but one of the most splendid apartment buildings in the North Oakland apartment district. It is a curious trapezoidal shape, crammed into a lot that is not quite rectangular and using up every inch of it.
There are some stitching errors in this very large composite photograph, and old Pa Pitt is too lazy to fix them.
-
Robert Burns by J. Massey Rhind
This is one of several Robert Burns statues that J. Massey Rhind made for various cities in the United States. Pittsburgh’s was sponsored by Andrew Carnegie and other prominent Pittsburghers of Scots ancestry.
Cameras: above, Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3; below, Olympus E-20n.
