Stealing Beauty from a Viennese Garden

It's a lovely midsummer's Sunday
here in Vienna,
very hot, in the high thirties,
but low humidity and beautiful light.
If you live in an old apartment building
from the early 1900s,
that keeps you nice and cool,
you feel no desire
to hit the sun-baked pavement outside.




Do you remember
the last scene of the movie
"Notting Hill",
the happy couple,
Anna Scott and William Thacker,
(Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant)
sitting on a bench
in a "Secret Garden",
a private little park,
for the use of the people who live
in the apartment buildings framing it?
I have the incredible luck
of being able to look down,
from my Viennese apartment,
into such a garden, an island of mature trees
and flower beds, tended to by the neighbours.

Even though I did not venture out into the heat,
I let my eyes wander from up high, to the garden below.
at six o'clock in the evening,
when I spotted
my next door neighbour watering her plants.
She is the Mistress of the most beautiful part of the gardens,
the one I can look right down into from my dining room
and kitchen windows.
I went downstairs to join her for a chat,
and a photo safari.
The pictures above are some of her pink beauties,
a small part of the wide variety of flowers
Mrs. F nurtures in her own piece of heaven.


Mrs. F's Paradise

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As always, clicking on the pictures
will open a larger version.