5.7.23 ~ Connecticut College Arboretum
One last walk with Janet in Connecticut… (There may be walks together in North Carolina in our future…) It was a lovely, sunny, spring day. So many blossoms!!!
5.7.23 ~ Connecticut College Arboretum
After enjoying the wildflower garden we crossed the college campus and visited another garden, this one of ornamental trees and shrubs from around the world.
You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light. Under the bare trees the wildflowers bloom so thick you can’t walk without stepping on them. The pastures turn green and the leaves come.
~ Wendell Berry
(Hannah Coulter: A Novel)
I will miss my adventures with Janet, sharing with each other all the little details we notice along the way.
beautiful photos,Barbara. I will miss tjhis landscape too♥
Thank you, Leelah! It will be a big change for us. 💙
Beautiful gardens.
Thank you, Julie!
Lovely photos. The spring colors are refreshing to see. I love the purple trillium, it seems timeless.
Thank you, Ally! Janet is a big fan of trilliums, too, and there are so many kinds of them, but they bloom for such a short time.
God Bless you on your new journey. Thank you 🙏
Thank you for your kind words, Emily. 🙏
What beauty you two found (except for the bat, ha! I know they’re beneficial for catching mosquitoes and such, but they really creep me out!) The yellow swallowtail, though, is stunning!
It was so exciting to see the lovely swallowtail quietly drinking nectar on such a pretty blossom! Butterflies usually are darting around so much it’s very difficult to photograph them. Sorry about the bat, but I was fascinated to see one up so closely.
I would not have seen that dandelion seed has you not mention it, Barbara! A lovely morning!!
There’s so much that I want to comment on here. I will keep it short though.
I agree with Debbie about the bay. Creepy! My stomach did back flips.
The fern forrest is my favorite.
I considered not posting the bat picture so as not to distress my more sensitive readers but I found it a fascinating discovery, another precious creature of the natural world in the web of life. I get it, though. I cringe when I see pictures of spiders! I’m glad you appreciated the hapless little dandelion seed. So many little dramas in the natural world.
*bat
What a lovely day for a garden visit. The awakening world is so wonderful this time of year. I personally love bats, they’re so maligned! I hope this one was just using the rock to warm up and wasn’t sick. 🙏🏼
I’m with you, Eliza, I find them fascinating. We didn’t get too close but the bat didn’t seem to be breathing and we suspected it might have just died. But who knows? I hope your theory is correct. Maybe I should send the picture to the nature center and ask them what they think might be the story.
Such lovely flowers and trees, to enjoy while walking with a friend. Hope you can find walks to share with Janet in other lovely woods and gardens. Love to you both, Love, Liz
Thank you, Liz! I’m getting excited to visit the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill and I hope we can all get there for a lovely stroll some day soon. Lots of love to you, too. 💙
Barbara, your eye and your wonderful camera did it again; great photos of our jaunt.
Looking forward to having you show me around the woods in North Carolina!
Hugs til then
Thank you so much, Janet. It’s always a pleasure having you there, pointing out things I would have missed and waiting patiently for me to get the perfect shot. 🙂 (((hugs)))
You’ve made Connecticut come alive for me through your hikes and wonderful pictures. Thank you Barbara. I look forward to discovering N. Carolina with you. Hope the move is easy. Much love.
Thank you so much, Rosie! It warms my heart to know you’ve been coming along on these little local adventures and that you will be following me down south. Lots of love to you. 💙
Dear Barbara, I so enjoyed this bonanza of spring magic, thank you. Your eastern plants and trees are a delight, for we don’t see much of this on the west coast. I was especially dazzled by all the trilliums. And the beech tree…so huge and beautiful. The ferns, bat, butterfly, catbird, paths–so enchanting. Appreciated the identification of each plant. Thanks so much.
You’re welcome, my friend! It was wonderful getting a last glimpse of our local spring ephemerals before we move to North Carolina, where spring will come earlier in the year and will perhaps acquaint me with new wildflowers to photograph. 🙂
Wow – two Springtime strolls on on morning and so much to see Barbara! You identified a lot of wildflowers here and I love the shots of “unfurling” which is one of the most beautiful parts of Spring. You chose a perfect quote to accompany these strolls. I saw the picture of the bat and since I’ve never seen a bat, I didn’t know what it was. I guess I would be taken aback seeing it, or worried it might be sick or rabid. Well that sounds promising that you may be walking with Janet in North Carolina. Something else to look forward to.
It’s fun to visit this garden in the spring because there are so many little signs indicating the names of the trees and wildflowers, although sometimes it’s a challenge to figure out which sign goes with what specimen. 😉 I think that was the first bat I’ve seen up close, and the zoom lens let me keep a respectable distance from it. (I was concerned about rabies and also suspected it might be dead.) Sometimes I see them flying in the evening when we go to outdoor plays at the arboretum and appreciate their efforts to keep the mosquito population down.
It looked like an enjoyable morning and I liked how you were able to identify everything. My Michigan Wildflower book is as yet unopened. I forgot to tell you that I learned about the wild Columbine in this post. I have some of this growing in my garden at the side of the house, in the rocks – maybe three or four plants and that is how I noticed the hummingbird the first time before I bought the hummingbird feeders – my one hummingbird was bopping from plant to plant. Yes, that is true about bats. Just like centipedes like household insects, but it is hard to like a centipede (for me anyway). 🙂
That’s lovely you have some wild columbine growing in your garden! Last summer I enjoyed watching the hummingbirds visit our pot of petunias. I used to get geraniums for the balcony, which I love, for the summer, but I read that petunias attract hummers and decided to try them. (I’m too unmotivated to be bothered with cleaning a feeder all summer long.) But deadheading those petunias was much more tedious than tending to geraniums! Well, at least I won’t have to decide which way to go this summer. 😉
Yes, the wild Columbines are beautiful Barbara … hardy too. I like geraniums and they are not high maintenance. Petunias are a little high maintenance, but the worst, in my opinion, is impatiens. I used to buy the bags to hang on the cyclone fence … three bags out front and one in the backyard as a spare in case one out front looked bad. I’d be out there daily deadheading them and they’d still get leggy and ugly by August. I took my hummer feeders in early last Summer. It was just too hot – I imagined the nectar boiling in the dish. I only have one hummingbird and even though I bought a product to mix with the sugar water to keep it sweet (my feeders are in the sun), I got ants combined with the hot water, risk of spoilage. You can decide next year which way to go. 🙂
Gardening and bird-feeding can be so exhausting!!! But I guess the payoff is having beautiful things to look at all summer long. 🙂
That is true – I would like my yard to look like it once did, but it was a lot of work and for younger legs. I would try to reproduce some of it, but back when I began creating my gardens (flowers and bushes) back in 1985, our weather was not as erratic and it is not getting better. Starting from scratch does not seem wise to me even though I think about it a lot, specially since the fire. My neighbor has now rebuilt the garage and replaced the stockade fence, so his yard looks great now, but mine not so much. I tell myself I didn’t incur fire damage and that puts it in perspective pretty quickly.
Lovely shots! The path to the rock garden is wonderful. I am amazed you found a bat!! 😲
Thank you, Donna! We were quite surprised to see that bat and still wonder why he was there…