a trip to the botanical gardens

Last Sunday (yeah, I've been slow to get to blogging it) Grandpa John came with us to visit the Matthai Botanical Gardens.

TJ and Corey and I used to go there and we referred to it as "visiting summer", because we usually went in the winter.That was, of course, in the days when there were few places indoors for kids to play so winter was long and cold and visiting summer was extremely welcome come about the middle of February.

On this trip, we saw many of my old favorites - -we saw a chocolate tree, a banana tree, and an orange tree. We found a rosemary bush and a bay laurel ... is that a tree or a bush? The camellias were beautiful, as were the orchids.

We saw some meat eating plants, which Jack was pretty dubious about, even though all three of his adults assured him it was so.

We found a huge colony of rather large spiders over the fish pond -- I think we counted about a dozen of them! I pondered that I had never heard of social spiders...and Rod pointed out that the only thing a "colony" of spiders suggest is a lot of bugs. Sure enough, there were hundreds of tiny flying insects in the same area.


But hands down, Jack's favorite - -as was true for his older brothers before him, was the the pond of HUGE gold-fish! There are perhaps a half dozen gold fish in a cement "pond" in the middle of the gardens and since they have plenty to eat and no predators, they have passed the "gold fish" stage and made it all the way to "carp-dom".

Not only are they huge, but they're beautiful. Our favorite was a reddish gold with black spots, but there were also white and yellow ones and a reddish gold one without spots.

The plants were interesting and all, but the fish moved and seemed to be paying attention to him! That's far more satisfying to a young man, so once we reached that part of the conservatory, Jack was reluctant to move on.

Fortunately, it also made a lovely spot fold his elders to stop and rest our weary bones, so we didn't mind.

All in all, a lovely visit. We spent just over an hour at the conservatory and got warm through and saw many interesting thing ... and then we were off home for warm soup and conversation.

Lovely.