Scatterday - X

This time it is the turn of possibly the most dreaded letter!
Our categories are
# hidden
# famous
# alive
# crosses in quilts.

As you will see, most of my photos were taken during a trip to one venue.

Hidden:

The "O" gate at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne is composed of multiple "X" shapes. Maybe the Xes aren't very hidden, but there is something hidden among the Xes.  Can you spot it?



At each intersection there is a flower medallion, except for one, which features this instead:

Famous:

Xanthorrhoea, or Grass Tree, in the Botanic Gardens. Xanthorrhoeas grow very slowly, so this one must be hundreds of years old. It must have started its life somewhere else, as they are not native to the Melbourne area.

Alive:

Xeriscape of the Arid Garden at the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. When I was a kid I didn't quite believe that cactus plants were alive; they looked to me as if they were plastic.

Another view of part of the Arid Garden. I took these photos last week. I'm including a second photo because on Tuesday night this week someone attacked this garden and chopped down most of the tall cacti. It is hard to understand what would motivate a person to be so destructive. Staff at the gardens will propagate replacements from the chopped pieces where they can, but it will be a couple of decades before the cacti reach the size of those that were attacked.

Crosses in quilts:

Not actually on a quilt, but definitely related to quilts; this is the badge of the online group SCQuilters, or Southern Cross Quilters. Before I joined the group I had often seen the badge on women at quilt shows, and leapt to the interesting conclusion that a lot of nuns are quilters. In my defence, I'd never got close enough to read the small print. From a distance it resembled the badges the nuns wore at a Catholic school I once taught at, so I thought all the women with this badge belonged to another order of nuns!

As usual, you can visit Cinzia's blog to find out how everyone else met the dreaded X challenge.