Sunday/ the Palmengarten

I lucked out with an early check-in into the hotel on Sunday, so I could catch a few hours of sleep (did not get much on the overnight flight).  By the time I woke up in the afternoon, there was not much time to go out, and besides, most German stores and buildings are closed on Sunday.   So .. since it is spring and the Palmengarten botanical garden not far from my hotel in the west end of the city was open, that was a *natural* choice to make.

The Palmengarten botanical garden opened in 1871 and was an instant success with the public.  It covers some 22 hectares (54 acres) and is one of the largest botanical gardens in Germany.

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I admired the complicated exterior and colored panels on this building for a banking group (KFW) on the corner of Bockenheimerstrasse and Zeppelinallee.
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This is the cactus collection in the greenhouse of the Palmgarten. It’s worth a trip just to go check out the desert and semi-desert displays : from South America, Mexico (picture), Northern and Southern Africa and even Madagascar.
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This is the Goethe garden and memorial in the Palmengarten. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a writer and poet, and born in Frankfurt in 1749. The words on the middle pillar says something like ‘Nature is the only book of which all pages offer high quality’.
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One of the open spaces in the Palmengarten with another greenhouse, and the Frankfurt tower in the background.
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I’m sitting in front of a piece of the trunk of a giant sequoia redwood tree (hopefully from a fallen tree!). These sequoias occur naturally only in groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
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A swan in the little lake in the Palmgarten.
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I love this tongue-in-cheek entrance to the Bockenheimer-Warte U-bahn station : a train car that crashed into the ground. (Or maybe not a good idea? .. it will scare off passengers?).
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This life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex is in front of the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History that I had visited on a previous trip, but not noticed. It must not have been there at that time, or I would have noticed it.
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And this is artwork nearby called Love Hate. (If you stand on the other side, it reads ‘Hate’). Yes : love and hate are sometimes two sides of the same coin, no?

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