Late summer at the BBG

There was actually less tornado damage than I was expecting, other than these guys:

But there were all manner of odd and spiky plants towering and lurching and flailing all over the garden.

This thing, for example, was wider than my wingspan.

I never knew that thistles blew out like this at the end of the season. Amazing.

More scenes from a commute

BBG

There's something that feels just a smidge pathetic about reporting on a weekend when you're much closer to the next weekend than the one being reported, but here we are anyway. This past weekend at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I took a little detour into the native flora section, with cool stuff like tree-sized rhododendrons:
and weird, spiky grasses.
But the main draw was the rose garden, which was full to bursting with roses at their peak. Going back through my photos, I learned that I really like somewhat unusually shaped blossoms...

...and anything either multi-colored or orange. The orange was a surprise, I have to say. Not a huge fan generally, but I do love orange roses.

And anytime there's a bee on a flower, it's an automatic win as far as I'm concerned.

Monday flowers

I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden this weekend because it was supposed to rain pretty heavily Saturday morning during their free hours. I was bummed since I had missed it last weekend (out of town for work) and will miss it again this weekend (going to visit my parents), and I knew the bluebells were blooming and I'm crazy about them. Happily, I did end up taking a quick walk through because it actually did cut off a corner to walk through the garden from Eastern Parkway over to Washington Ave. and was not disappointed.

I love the bluebells.

But there was plenty of other good stuff to see too, like this gorgeous, all-over-the-place, cottage-garden-type arrangement of rich purple and pink and white.

It started raining while I was in there, so I had the pleasure of seeing these sodden peonies and roses, sparkling with raindrops and especially fragrant in the cool, damp air.

Monday flower report

I have a feeling this is going to be a regular thing around here, this posting of photos on Monday of what I saw at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden over the weekend. I went Saturday morning hoping for lilacs and was not disappointed.

Screw Disneyworld. This is the happiest place on Earth.

But I hadn't realized the peonies, which I adored, would be blooming too.

Nor that the tulip garden had such a varied and stunning range of blooms (and fans).

I crossed a part of the lawn I hadn't been on before and saw this set-up from a distance. The part of my subconscious mind that believes in magic was all, 'oh, that must be the mailbox for whoever lives in that tree,' before my rational mind caught up and was like, 'DUH, brain. They would just leave the mail at the front gate.'
(The actual purpose that little stump-on-a-post serves is so prosaic and antithetical to anything approaching magic that I can't even bring myself to type it out.)

I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Saturday morning, mostly because I was hoping that their lilacs would be blooming (and also because it's free admission from 10–12). They weren't, but plenty of other stuff was.

I was particularly intrigued by the variety of green flowers in bloom:

I liked that this tree looks like it's draped in cobwebs. This is the tree Miss Havisham would picnic under.

These seem to be the only cherry blossom-related photos I took. Because I'm, like, so dark.

Pretty color! And in focus!

Going out and looking at things without a particular agenda is one of my favorite things to do. It refills my creative coffers in a way that nothing else quite does; I actually figured out a way around a problem in one of my writing projects while I was walking around. And if I hadn't been there, I would have missed the way the sun was hitting these blossoms. And that would have been a pity.