Brookside Gardens in October 2012

October at Brookside Gardens - fall and the always lush conservatory plantings. This post is a quick sweep of plants from the conservatory and fall foliage in the rest of the garden. I’ll do some themed posts over the course of the next week on roses, gourds/squashes/pumpkins and mums.

The collage above shows plants in the conservatory. The bird of paradise always seems to be blooming. There were several grasses with large seed heads; the one in the lower right of the collage has a lot more color than some of the others. The shape of the uncurling leaf to the right is what caught my attention….and the lighting heightens the effect of the curves and color. The images in the collage below are all from the outdoor gardens. One of the few bushes blooming in the outdoor gardens was a fall camellia; otherwise the color is from fall leaves. The shelf fungus at the bottom right is on a stump I always check. The colors are more subtle than the fall leaves; the shelf fungus will stand out more in winter when all the fall color has faded away.

The collage below has two of my favorite trees - the sweet gum against the sky and the gingko in the lower left. The tea house with the colorful maples and the still-mostly-green papyrus in the pool complete this collage.

Brookside in Early April

There was a Camellia Show at Brookside Gardens this past Saturday. I enjoyed walking through it and taking pictures. There are a number of aspects to the flowers that I was trying to capture: many yellow stamens, vein patterns in their petals, varying colors of the petals, and the slight variations of the petals themselves.

Many of the ferns had already unfurled with the earlier warmth this spring but there were still a few fiddleheads.

The tulips are also most their prime so I found myself looking at the color variations in their petals - like the purple and white below. And then there are other springtime flowers - Jack-in-the-Pulpits, wisteria, dogwood, azaleas and other bulbs. Spring has sprung!