The 21st Century Matriarch

The Springfield Botanical Garden is already one of my favorite places to walk around….easily taking the place of Brookside Gardens in Maryland. We parked near the rose garden. The roses were looking a little challenged by the summer heat but there were plenty of summer flowers to enjoy: cone flowers, zinnias, sunflowers (to name a few).

The hosta garden is always a cool and damp oasis. We arrived before 8 AM….before the heat of the day. I enjoyed photographing the flowers and leaves with water droplets on them.

There was one caladium leaf that had a shape like butterfly wings!

The lilies were still blooming profusely (see the June post for earlier in their bloom period). I took very zoomed images to avoid spent blooms that are part of the scene this month. It seemed that mesh had been put around more of the beds…maybe deer have become a problem.

I hadn’t noticed the Osage orange tree near one of the pollinator gardens before. It is full of fruit now. It is an interesting tree….without an efficient means of propagation without human assistance. Its seed dispersal evidently was via extinct megafauna (giant ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, etc.). But – it was widely used for fencing/wind breaks by settlers and has been planted in all 48 contiguous states of the US and in southeastern Canada. It is not a rare tree even though it could become so without continued attention.