@BioDivLibrary #bhltechmtg sheltering in restaurant basement during tornado warning

My visits to four of the the world's great botanical gardens in the past two months ...

Life as BHL Program Director is not always windowless conference rooms in Natural History museums. Though there are plenty of those (as well as exciting tours through the nooks and crannies of those same museums), in the past few months I've had the great pleasure of seeing four of the world's great botanical gardens (and their libraries). I just missed on a fifth, the Royal Botanic Gardens (Melbourne) because of a packed schedule, but had see that a few years earlier.

This week I was at the Missouri Botanical Garden (pictures below). It was a very rainy couple of days (with some tornadoes thrown in), some my Garden time was mostly in the Climatron dome!

So, in order of visits, here they are:

Singapore Botanical Garden.
Beautiful location and lovely facilities.



Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Luckily, the rain held off for my visit and I had a great stroll all the way across the garden.



New York Botanical Garden.
My first visit to the NYBG! Had a surprise snowstorm that made the grounds charming.



Missouri Botanical Garden.
Rainy days and thunderstorms, so not much outside strolling.



I should also through in here some pictures of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, the amazing botanical garden in Cape Town, South Africa, that I visited in 2012:



And, some pictures from the Royal Botanic Gardens (Melbourne) from a 2010 visit:

Good morning St Louis, thanks for the efficient tornado sirens and loudspeakers this morning

Good morning St. Louis form the Missouri Botanical Garden

Red door Trelease House, Missouri Botanical Garden

'Cause you know, we are stardust we are golden and we got to get back to the Garden!

Time to switch gears (and avatars) from #CNI14S to @BioDivLibrary #BHLTechMtg

The dodo switches look just a bit ... looking forward to some productive time with the BHL Tech Team and the Technical Advisory Group over the next few days.

A sunny, but brisk, good morning to St. Louis

And an early good night to Saint Louis...

My annual Giant Cliff picture from #CNI14S

MetroLink that will take me to #CNI14s in STL

FBI office in St. Louis

My neighbor across from the Marriott

Good morning St. Louis, looks like a sunny day for #CNI14s

A visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden

QotD: "Many years ago my first contact with the Land of the Dead: It is in the backyard of 4664 Pershing Avenue." WS Burroughs

And here's another view of the William S. Burrough's birthplace as well as another quote of the day:

"Many years ago my first contact with the Land of the Dead: It is in the backyard of 4664 Pershing Avenue. Darkness and patches of oil and smell of oil. In the house now, and I am bending over Mother from in front, eating her back, like a dinosaur. Now Mother comes screaming into the room: “I had a terrible dream that you were eating my back.” I have a long neck that reaches up and over her head. My face in the dream is wooden with horror. It is like a segment of film underexposed. Not enough light. The light is running out. Dinosaurs rise from the tar pits on La Brea Avenue. Oil and coal gas."

From My Education: A Book of Dreams (1986-1994). As collected in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998)

QotD: "His mother had been to dancing school with “Tommy Eliot”—(His socks wouldn’t stay up. His hands were clammy." WS Burroughs

I had an opportunity to visit St. Louis on business and stayed at the Chase Park Plaza hotel in the Central West End. I've been there before, but while browing Google Maps, I saw that the birthplace of William S. Burroughs was just around the corner. Had to stop and take a peek (as I have always found Burroughs strangely compelling, both as a writer, a person, and a personality).

So, our quote today is from the Word Virus anthology:

"ST. LOUIS RETURN (ticket to St. Louis and return in a first class room for two people who is the third that walks beside you?) After a parenthesis of more than forty years I met my old neighbor, Rives Skinker Mathews, in Tangier. I was born 4664 Berlin Avenue changed it to Pershing during the war. The Mathews family lived next door at 4660—red brick three-story houses separated by a gangway large back yard where I could generally see a rat one time or another from my bedroom window on the top floor. Well we get to talking St. Louis and “what happened to so and so” sets in and Rives Mathews really knows what happened to any so and so in St. Louis. His mother had been to dancing school with “Tommy Eliot”—(His socks wouldn’t stay up. His hands were clammy. I will show you fear in dancing school)—Allow me to open a parenthesis you see Rives Mathews had kept a scrapbook of St. Louis years and his mother left a collection of visiting cards from the capitals of Europe. I was on my way back to St. Louis as I looked through Rives’s scrapbook dim flickering pieces of T. S. Eliot rising from the pages—(But what have I my friend to give you put aside on another tray? Those cards were burned in my winter house fire, October 27,1961..."

From The Burroughs Files (1984), "St. Louis Return" (1965). As collected in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998)

Good morning St. Louis

Olin Library, WUSTL

Good afternoon St. Louis