Humming Birt.

How about a Norfolk Island Pine for next Christmas? The one at the Botanic Garden comes with its own star on top.



The Great Dance-Nik, a.k.a. The Giant Burmese Honeysuckle, has her own placard.




What a treasure this place is. It's free, and you walk off the street and you're in another world for as long as you want to stay. Plotnik met a German tourist yesterday, who told him the German word for Hummingbird. It sounded like: "kolipri."

She said "In Chermany ve do not hav very much the humming birt."

Plotnik thought of his and Duck's good friends from Munich, Gerhild and Irmtraut, so he didn't make the offhand comment about humming Germans. What surprised him was that his brain can still come up with these images about that country, even though all the bad stuff happened before he was born, even though he knows wonderful German people, even though to this little blonde tourist at the Botanic Gardens the Nazis probably are as distant as the Spanish American War is to us. Better to think about redwood trees.