Best of Rest at Brookside

I’ve already done 3 blog posts this week about my walk around Brookside Gardens (ginkgo buds, tulips, and landscapes). This time of year the gardens are very different every time I go. This post is the last one for the April walk around the gardens – and the best of the rest of my pictures: unfurling leaves,

A globe of small flowers catching the sun,

The last wave of narcissus blooms,

A mourning dove giving me a wary look from high above my head (the zoom works well for pictures like this),

Deciduous magnolia blossoms – damaged by the frost but not enough to be destroyed completely,

And fiddleheads. I didn’t see these at first because they still looked mostly brown and the old fronds from last fall were all around them. Soon they uncurl and make the space under the trees lush with greenery.

Brookside Conservatory – January 2017

There was work replanting some of the conservatory beds at Brookside Gardens when I was there last week. There were still enough plants in bloom to enjoy….and it was much warmer than outside! I liked the view from one of the bridges over the bubbling water…so dense with foliage that the water itself couldn’t be seen.

Pink and green always seems like a beautiful color combination.

A bloom had fallen into the water and looked very much like a butterfly.

The bird of paradise flower always reminds me of a spiked mohawk haircut!

And there are plant pompoms (or powder puffs) too.

The banana palm had bananas! The plant seems to frequently be in some stage of fruit development but I’ve never been around when the bananas were any color but green.

And then there were flowers for zoomed portraits.

The tree fern had many fiddleheads. I enjoyed photographing them and savored the memory of my trip to Hawaii a little over a year ago.