Fellow Portland bloggers are all about the Yard, Garden and Patio Show, which took place in our fair city over the weekend. Saturday was my target day, but guess what? After incessant rain and gray skies, Saturday dawned bright and clear. I could not bring myself to spend such a day anywhere but in my very own garden. If you want to experience YGP vicariously, I can direct you to two excellent sources: Danger Garden and Mulch Maid. In fact, I was so sure of their excellent accounts that my decision to stay home was an easy one. Often their reports and photos top the live experience.

So what shall I write about instead? A couple of weeks ago, my daughter, Hillary, was visiting from San Francisco. We planned to catch a rush seat at a matinee performance at the Gerding Theater, but got the times confused. Instead, we took off walking, with no particular destination in mind. Heading South on 11th, we crossed Burnside and turned left on Washington, to discover a mini fashion district. Several small storefronts along Washington have been taken over by independent designers and dress shops. We fingered the luxe fabrics, tried on a few things and wound up here:

As an example of the sort of little shops I’ve been talking about. The others had been too dark inside to take pictures, but when we stepped through these doors…

We found not only a space filled with light, but a plant sensibility that sent me digging in my bag for the camera.

Every display surface featured my kind of plants: everything from Tillandsias to this Sanseveria planted in moss and rocks in a glass cube.

Oh, and the clothes were pretty nice, too.

The shopkeeper gave us a card for the designer at Space Design Botanicals who had done the displays. We then wended our way back to the car via the Museum of Contemporary Craft, a stunning photography show at Blue Sky Gallery and a bowl of authentic French onion soup at a little bistro. It was a grand day, and we wound up thinking that missing the play had not been such a bad thing.