Meetings with Remarkable Trees

Had a bit of a lie in to catch up on sleep after the flight. We tried out the hotel breakfast which was edible but not memorable. Later we got out for a city walk along the waterfront. The island of Sao Miguel made its wealth from oranges in the last century and there are a number of fine buildings in the city centre in a rather grand colonial style. The pavements are mostly patterned with black and ivory mosaic tiles which must have taken forever to lay down. But people have time here.
Later on we found a fine little cafe in a side street and from scanning our guide book, figured out how to order a large cup of strong coffee with milk in Portuguese. In this main port, many people can speak a smattering of English but it makes me feel even more like a typical tourist to assume everyone else will speak our language. Plus I love languages anyway.
It was pretty humid still so we headed off to a garden. The main guidebook to the Azores was written by a guy who is a keen botanist and plantsman. We talked with someone in the airport who had visited Flores ( the small island we are flying on to tomorrow) and described it as "Jurassic Park". It is certainly a fertile place with volcanic soil and a temperate climate. In reading about one of the public gardens, our guidebook author commented that "although kept clean, the garden has seen better times, and I feel that today many trees are awaiting death to relieve them of their misery." So we didn't go there. We went to a remarkable Botanic Garden created in the eighteenth century by a wealthy trader called José do Campo. Over ten acres of mature trees from across the globe, so different in their forms and leaf shapes from the majority that we see in northern Europe.
The tree in this picture is an Australian Banyan or Moreton Bay Fig ( Ficus Macrophylla) which had the most extraordinary root structures where Hanne Lene found a place to make herself comfortable.