April 01, 2020

One pleasure of travel is the opportunity to marvel over monuments built by earlier civilizations: Stonehenge, Roman arenas and bridges, castles — and, most recently for us, Mesoamerican pyramids at Teotihuacán, about an hour’s drive northeast of Mexico City. We hired an Uber driver to take us there and back and spent about 5 hours climbing, exploring the ancient city’s ruins, seeing the site museum, and admiring a small native-plant garden.

Who built the stepped pyramids and surrounding dwellings of Teotihuacán? No one knows for sure. Archaeologists believe construction began around 100 B.C., and the city thrived through 650 A.D., ultimately swelling to a population of 100,000. But it was a ghost town by the time the Aztecs arrived circa 1200 A.D. — 1,000 years after Teotihuacán was built — and the Aztecs would have marveled over its ancient pyramids just as we do today.

By 1832 the Pyramid of the Sun — the largest pyramid at Teotihuacán, pictured at top — would have been overgrown with vegetation, as shown in this reproduction artwork by Jean Baptiste Louis.

Reconstruction restored the pyramids and continues to this day. Many areas at Teotihuacán are marked off

March 30, 2020

The garden reemerged last weekend, after copious raking and blowing and bagging, from the annual spring deluge of last season’s live oak leaves and subsequent pollen catkins. I ran around with the camera, capturing the gorgeousness of new flowers and fresh foliage, like this pretty combo of ‘Tangerine Beauty’ crossvine (Bignonia capreolata ‘Tangerine Beauty’) and wine-leaved ‘Sizzling Pink’ loropetalum (Loropetalum chinense) on the cedar fence in the backyard.

The center of the fence offers a rare sunny spot in my garden, for half the day anyway, and this year the Katrina rose (Rosa ‘Peggy Martin’) sports dozens of clusters of pink flowers.

‘Tangerine Beauty’ crossvine rambles all along the length of the fence…

…keeping company with blue bottles on the bottle tree.

Looking lengthwise past the bottle tree, ‘Sizzling Pink’ loropetalum reappears, backed by a spiky blue fringe of Yucca rostrata.

Still on my to-do list: lightly prune the loropetalum, which threatens to overrun the path.

I adore those burgundy leaves as they catch the sunlight.

The loropetalum echoes the rusty steel planter in front of the blue wall. Orange bulbine has just started blooming again, mingling with the soft texture of

March 27, 2020

A romantic, violet veil brightens Mexico City each spring, when jacaranda trees unfurl a profusion of purple flowers on bare, sinuous trunks lining parkways, park paths, and residential streets.

Jacaranda trees

I caught sight of the purple haze from the airplane as we descended over the smoggy city in early March. At ground level, in placid Alameda Central park in Centro Histórico, the historic city center, the view is even better.

These otherworldly, head-turning trees came from South America. According to online sources, a Japanese immigrant to Mexico (via Brazil) imported the jacaranda in place of cherry trees, which fared poorly in Mexico’s dry climate. The jacaranda thrives in Mexico City’s mild, dry, high elevation (7,300 feet!).

I’ve seen jacarandas in the U.S. in frost-free (or nearly so) locations like Phoenix and Southern California. But the profusion in Mexico City dazzled me.

I was forever stopping my family for “one more photo.” The airy trees are hard to photograph against a hazy sky, but the purple flowers pop against the greenery of other trees.

Lilac loveliness everywhere.

Palacio de Bellas Artes

Aside from jacarandas, Centro offers plenty of other attractions, like the amber-domed Palacio de Bellas Artes,