May 22, 2024

Hot Springs National Park – Bathhouse Row

May 22, 2024/ Gwen Morrison

My daughter and I headed to Hot Springs, Arkansas after visiting my dad in Dallas. It was a 2-day vacation in celebration of Mother’s Day. There are lots of things to do in the area; we chose to focus on two: the national park and Garvan Woodland Gardens. This is the first blog post about our trip.

There are eight bathhouses that are the historic core of Hot Springs National Park. Only one (the Buckstaff) still functions as a traditional bathhouse. The Fordyce functions as the park’s visitor center. It has many restored features – stained glass skylights, tile floors, a gym, elaborate baths. The changing cubicles seemed very small; there must have been fewer obese people when they were designed!

The Quapaw has been renovated as a modern spa.

We had lunch at the Superior – which is now a brewery. I enjoyed their root beer that is made with water from the springs and sweetened with honey.

My daughter and I spent the most time at the Buckstaff – enjoyed the Traditional Bathing Package: whirlpool tub, sitz bath, vapor cabinet, hot packs, and full body massage. The bathtubs and equipment are original to when the bathhouse opened in 1912! It’s a great way to experience history. One of the learning experiences: how to wear a sheet to be securely and completely covered.

Across the street there is a row of shops – appealing to tourists. I noticed the top of one of them looked like it might be painted tin (I learned to look for it in old buildings when I was in London, Ontario in 2022). There are also murals painted on the sides of buildings.

There are magnolias that line the street in front of the bathhouses. They were beginning to bloom.

There were mushrooms coming up near one of them and I couldn’t resist some macro pictures of the magnolia bark and the view into the top of one of the trees.

Tomorrow’s post will be about our hike from bathhouse row to the Hot Springs Mountain Tower.

August 12, 2020

Milkweed Bugs

August 12, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

I am waiting for the milkweed bugs to mature and fly away from one of the last milkweed plants standing in the flowerbed. They have been transitioning to adult form over the past few days. I’ve been taking pictures when I first start my hour of working in the flowerbeds. On the 8th I noticed a few adults – but still a lot of nymphs.

On the 9th there were fewer nymphs and it appeared that some had just made the last molt to become adults.

On the 10th…more were making the transition – shedding for the last time. The blobs of clear ‘skin’ with black squiggles are the sheds.

By the 11th it appeared that they had all become adults. They’ll fly away to look for fresh milkweed and I hope they find it at the pond where the milkweed looks great – unlike the stalks that I am now cutting down when I don’t see any caterpillars or milkweed bugs on them!

After photographing the milkweed bugs, I get busy cleaning out flower beds (and trimming bushes. I takes me about an hour to fill the wheelbarrow, take the load back to the edge of the forest, and plan the work I want to do the next morning.

On the 11th I took a few pictures after I was done with the gardening of small things in our yard…a bit a nature before I went inside to stay cool the rest of the day.

August 04, 2020

Yard Work

August 04, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

20200801_090426(0).jpg — The yard work seems to never be finished. My goal is to spend a morning hour every other day catching up. The front flowed beds are the first phase. The milkweed is looking awful and the day lily leaves need to be cut since they are turning yellow. I learned last year that trimming the day lily leaves back causes the plant to grow fresh leaves that last until frost. It probably reduces the bulb growth underground, but the deer take so many of the flowers that producing more bulbs is not my priority.

On the first morning, I cut or trimmed the most aphid infested milkweed and about 1/3 of the day lily leaves. I discovered it was slower going since I wanted to leave the black eyed susans (the deer eat them but maybe not quite as much as the day lily flowers).

The second morning, I continued working on the rest of the bed. There were still a lot of day lily leaves to go.

I use a wheelbarrow as my measure for each day – my goal it to fill it up. It wasn’t that difficult although it was only another 1/3 of the flower bed! I took the load back to the compost pile; it covered the kitchen scraps I had taken out before I started.

On the way back up the hill, I stopped to photograph some tiny orange fungus in the grass (I’ll check on them in the next few days…see if they become mushrooms) and a moth which I though was a leaf at first.

And then there were the milkweed bugs on one of the plants that I chose to leave up in the flower bed.

Now to find a third morning to finish off the work in the flower bed…and move on to the next flowerbed/bush trimming on my list. It won’t be tomorrow since the forecast is for all day rain from Tropical Storm Isaias.

I’m getting more accomplished on the flower beds now that I’ve settled on the wheelbarrow metric and planning to be out for only an hour. I am not an enthusiastic gardener, but I do want the flower beds to look a lot better than they do right now and am psyched to get there an hour at a time. I am hopeful that I’ll get to a point that I can take off an occasional day (or not get too far behind if the weather does not cooperate) in the next few weeks. The other change I’ve made is to wear my river (field trip) boots; they take away my excuse that the foliage it too wet!

We are at home so much right now that there is no excuse to not have the yard it great shape.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Watermelon. We ate our first watermelon from the CSA this season. It was small enough to eat in one sitting for my husband and I. It was yellow (rather than red) and had seeds….but we both enjoyed it tremendously. I’d love to get one of the big red melon with seeds that I remember from my childhood but it seems like they aren’t grown very much anymore.

July 27, 2020

Walk at Mt Pleasant – Part 1

July 27, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

I got up at my regular time and was out of the house a few minutes before 6; the sun was up but it was still very much the ‘magic hour’ for photography when I got to Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant Farm. There were only two other cars and I didn’t see any other people around before I headed out on my walk. I hadn’t been there to walk around since back in January….completely missed the spring which I usually get to observe many times as I volunteer for school field trips that come there…but not this spring. I noted a sign about social distancing and no large groups. The picnic tables looked so pristine and lonely. There would be plenty of space of a group of 10ish to eat lunch far enough apart; it would look odd to me since I am used to the school groups that often ate there after a field trip and were almost always more than 100 people.

2020 07 IMG_0875 (2).jpg — On a positive note – the orchard has fruit this year. In 2019 a late frost caused all the blossoms/newly forming fruit to fail. I thought it might have happened this year too but there are fruits on both the pear and apple trees. The pear might not have edible fruit (I think they are usually bigger by this time)

But the apples have a lot of green fruit that will be begin turning red soon.

The door to Montjoy bar seemed to not fit as well as they did at one time…they sag a little. I wondered how long ago they were painted.

The trumpet vine was growing profusely over the arbor near the children’s garden. Insects were enjoying the flowers. I made the mistake of walking under it and a bee flew around my head for some distance beyond. Not sure why I was attractive to the bee.

There were lots of meadow plants in bloom – horse nettle, thistles, Queen Anne’s lace, bindweed, a pleated mushroom. Something to photograph at every turn.

I’m not usually keen on landscape pictures but there was mist coming off the ground and it added dimension to the contours of the land. The sun had been up for about 45 minutes. I could already tell that the mist was burning off as I walked…could feel the high humidity.

The bird houses have been refreshed and painted. The background paint is a light blue and then natural things are painted over the blue. It’s a nice change in the meadow even though I also appreciated the old natural wood houses with occasional patches of lichen and moss. There is a sign on the pole cautioning to stay away because they are tree swallow homes. I wonder if they put the signs on after they knew it was a tree swallow using the house rather than a bluebird.

The meadows looked very lush and growing wild. The place looks more overgrown than most summers…and I think it is more than not mowing as much. There are not as many people around. There are even ripe blackberries in the meadow than haven’t been picked. During previous summers, the campers ate blackberries as soon as they were ripe!

The stream seemed to be running more in the channel closest to the beach area rather than the one we used to think was the deeper one. It was running slowly…the last rainstorm already mostly drained off. It felt a cooler down at the stream in the deep shade.

Most of the milkweed was past blooming with tiny seed pods forming although I did find two flowers– one in the meadow and one in the garden area near the flowerpot people. Both had interesting insects:

Milkweed beetles meeting each other – moving around quite a lot….another insect further down that didn’t move during my picture taking.