suns along the Mohawk

….. less than 3 miles away

– Schenectady’s Central Park Rose Garden, Central Parkway at Wright Ave. –

My friends Yu and Anita Chang literally live a stone’s throw away from Schenectady’s Central Park, and about two blocks from the Central Park Rose Garden, which is located less than three miles from our Stockade neighborhood.  Since yesterday was a particularly lovely, rain-free August day, Yu and I headed to the Garden with our respective digital cameras (his is much larger and fancier than mine, as befits a disciplined and gadget-oriented electrical engineering professor, and renowned haiku poet and haiga artist). The late afternoon sun was a little too bright for a photographic adventure, but we weren’t looking for perfection.

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– Robert Blood’s sculpture, Variations on the Chinese Character “Yuan” (Garden),

pointed me to that lovely white and red rose –

I snapped a lot more photos than I normally would in the hour we spent strolling the Rose Garden, which has over 4000 individual plants, and about 400 varieties of roses.  Being overwhelmed by giant displays and scores of beds, I was attracted to Robert Blood’s sculpture, Variations on the Chinese Character “Yuan” (Garden) and decided to play off of it for a lot of my shots.   Here’s a bunch of rose photos featuring the Yuan character, plus some odds and ends from around the park. [As always, scroll over the picture for a caption and click on it for a larger version of the photograph.]

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a favorite spot for brides ….

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update (August 1, 2010):  I got over to the Rose Garden yesterday, and the resulting post “July ends gracefully at Central Park” has two dozen photos from the Garden. As mentioned in the post, the Garden has been named one of the ten best public rose gardens in the nation.

2011 update (June 20, 2011): See our posting “rose garden in June.”