Brookside Gardens after a Rain

Before and after our session with the butterflies in the conservatory last week, I took short walks around a very wet Brookside Gardens. The stream near the entrance was flowing over boulders that have been added in past few years to control erosion. I took a picture up and down stream from the bridge. The vegetation has increased dramatically over the past month.

A squirrel enjoyed a nut on a low pine branch.

The old water garden has matured into a rain garden. I like the low growing plants spilling over the rocks.

The winds had blown a small branch of leaves out of a tulip poplar tree and into the parking lot.

There were wildflowers blooming along the boardwalk between the conservatory and the nature center.

My favorites were the Jack-in-the-Pulpit

And the columbine.

There were some very wet mushrooms growing on an injured tree trunk…covered with slugs.

Many of the ferns were already unfurled but there was a fiddlehead and unfurling frond that I couldn’t resist photographing.

There were some very wet irises in one of the formal gardens

But I liked the red poppies more.

Brookside Gardens with a Cell Phone

Earlier this week it was such a warm day that I wanted to get out and about - chose to go to Brookside Gardens. About halfway there, I realized I had forgotten my camera but then realized that I had my new cell phone (a Samsung Galaxy S7); it was time to experiment with the cell phone camera. I headed to the boardwalk between the conservatories and the Nature Center. The skunk cabbage was still not up under the cypress trees but there were crocus

And some dried ferns that were catching the sunlight (they look like big feathers!).

I walked toward the ponds and saw other early bulbs blooming

And turtles taking advantage of the warm day to come out of the mud at the bottom of the pond. I was beginning to learn about the camera in the phone; it does zoom (8x) but it’s all digital so the zoomed images sometimes look fuzzy.

As I trekked toward the witch hazel I had seen last time I visited Brookside – I saw a butterfly and managed to get a picture! It looks like a Question Mark Butterfly…hope there were others it found that were out and about.

Then I found the witch hazel trees again. They were still very bright with streamers around their blooms.

Some trees still have fried leaves clinging from last fall.

I learned that the camera in the cell phone does relatively well close up too.

As I completed the loop back to my car, I noticed some greenery between rocks (daffodils?) near the stream and wondered how the bulbs got wedged in that location.

Brookside Conservatory – January 2017

There was work replanting some of the conservatory beds at Brookside Gardens when I was there last week. There were still enough plants in bloom to enjoy….and it was much warmer than outside! I liked the view from one of the bridges over the bubbling water…so dense with foliage that the water itself couldn’t be seen.

Pink and green always seems like a beautiful color combination.

A bloom had fallen into the water and looked very much like a butterfly.

The bird of paradise flower always reminds me of a spiked mohawk haircut!

And there are plant pompoms (or powder puffs) too.

The banana palm had bananas! The plant seems to frequently be in some stage of fruit development but I’ve never been around when the bananas were any color but green.

And then there were flowers for zoomed portraits.

The tree fern had many fiddleheads. I enjoyed photographing them and savored the memory of my trip to Hawaii a little over a year ago.