It’s now July, the Buenos Aires equivalent of Deep Freeze. Yet, even in winter, the city remains verdant, or more precisely, half-so - one block may feature a towering row of sycamores, stripped naked to their mottled skins, still dropping their last leaves. The next? Jungle-dense with glossy, larger-than-life greenhouse plants and thick intricate fig trees tall as the streetlamps.

This visual incongruity also serves another, subtler, purpose. The lush foliage of the city is a bright streak of thriving life in a city whose tensions are evident in its half-finished buildings, disintegrating streets and trash-strewn sidewalks. Its beauty blurrs the harsh industrial lines beneath, a constant reminder of the insistent strength of even the smallest bits of life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Argentina, Buenos Aires, South America, Street Scenes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.