The first two photos show the view - standing and sitting - from my laptop
In the garden we have a number of tropical plants in a bed near the patio, just outside the back door from the sunroom. There's a hardy banana tree, again with two suckers, a plant that dies off at the first frost and starts to grow anew every summer. This year we couldn't tell if it had survived the frost and snow of the winter, as it had completely died off, so we were very pleased to see it putting up green shoots around M
Indoor banana tree, grown an extra leaf in the past week; garden banana - taken today and exactly one month ago - how much it's grown! ...and spot the bamboos
To recapture another aspect of our African lives, strangely enough the Ikea bentwood chairs in the sunroom evoke our early years there just as much as do the banana plants. I wrote about our Ikea - Africa connection in my post here - quite rational, in case you might think all those years in the tropical sun has somehow fried my brain.
The beautiful capiz shell hanging lamp you see in the corner is from the Philippines, where hubby lived before we met. It had been waiting for a home for nearly 30 years before it found its niche among our jungle greenery. At night the light reflected in the glass casts a warm glow over the entire area.
From my laptop vantage point I can see our shelf of African and Asian memorabilia, each piece carrying a store of memories and places, including the Tinga-Tinga paintings which Lynda will know all about - she has even blogged on that particularly Tanzanian art form. We have many more artefacts that have no display space, and I will have to work out some kind of museum-like rotation to do justice to the Ethiopian icon paintings and Bangladeshi brassware and Lao silk wall-hangings that have yet to see daylight in this house.
Perhaps another extension is the answer as the su
Ethnic artefacts - paintings from Tanzania: Tinga-Tinga poster and paintings, village scene and Kilimanjaro/elephant market paintings; batik of Ugandan musical instruments; Lao pan pipes and flute, African mbira (thumb piano) and Rwandan banjo.
5 comments:
I'm especially envious of your banana plants and wish I had the space and the proper light for one. Alas, I do not. I do have a fig plant indoors that's very successful in a kind of screwy way in that it grows toward the light only, making it a funny looking plant. It was nice to see your sun room, what a nice place to be.
What a lovely living space! I love the woodwork and your travel-themed decor.
LaTeaDah
Irene - Thanks for your comments, it is a nice space, and we are lucky to have the garden too. We have a small ficus benjamina in the sunroom which has flourished since repotting it and moving it from a darker windowsill some years ago. It is now about a metre high and densely leafy. I keep turning it around so it doesn't get wonky, most plants seem to grow towards the light I think. Even the banana has to be rotated every few weeks to prevent it from toppling over!
Keep on dropping by!
Catherine
La Tea Dah - Thanks for the nice comments, The woodwork ages nicely, getting that lovely honey glow. The travel theme is incidental as we have to put our stuff on display somehow, and there is a lot more still in trunks, which is a pity. We need a bigger extension! (thanks for the comments on Facebook too, I like your photos!)
Catherine
Love your sun room Catherine, looks quite big for Eur.! Much light is coming through all those windows, which is nice in the winter! Living in CA and having had a banana tree, makes me never want to have one again LOL we took out the roots 3 times and still are coming back, they plant itself forth like weeds, and they grow very tall - when they were 12 feet tall I urged my hubby to take them out. before they would take over the whole yard!
I was smiling when you talked about the art of the different countries you have been - the more you travel, the more that becomes a problem (a nice problem). Past few times I've reverted to buying food and kitchen items that we'll at least use:) Good to have you blogging again!
Post a Comment