Myrtle Beach

Today I’ve been learning more things about Myrtle Beach.

For starters, it’s huge. We’re in North Myrtle Beach, that’s the North Carolina end, and it stretches south into South Carolina for something like 60 continuous miles of beach.

This morning on my walk I was trying to figure out some flowering shrubby trees. They look like this:

I thought they might be the crepe myrtle of Myrtle Beach, but now I don’t think so. The flowers reminded me of a botanical drawing I found a couple of years ago in “The amateur’s greenhouse and conservatory : a handy guide to the construction and management of planthouses, and the selection, cultivation, and improvement of ornamental greenhouse and conservatory plants”, 1873, by Shirley Hibberd, a book that I think was digitized at Pitt, as part of one of the Google Book mass digitization projects and I found online in the Internet Archive.

Anyways, that picture is from the chapter on camellias.

I even saw one tree that had the partially white flowers, which some seed catalog I found says are:

So I guess that’s what they are.

And they’re a lot prettier than the scenery on the rest of my walk.

This is what America looks like.