On the 10th, we paid a visit to the university's peony garden. I had been wanting to visit during peony season for a very long time. We looked at our schedules, and at the weather, and decided to go ahead and go, despite the radar map showing the approach of something that looked like rain, at least.
On our way out the door, I saw this moth between the storm door and the inside door. It was big-ish -- almost 2" from head to tail, I bet. I gently convinced it to get outside the storm door. When it fluttered, some surface of its wings was distinctly orange.
Here it is, just outside the storm door, on the stoop, orange hidden beneath camouflage.
Ok, no more digressions -- let's go to the peony garden.
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The peony garden is huge. See all those rectangles-with-dots, courtesy of Google? (Love Google............) Each one of those rectangles is a peony bed with space thirty plants (the dots). Each plant has at least a square yard, all for itself. There are 27 beds. !!!
That is a LOT of peonies (even though not all the spaces in all the beds are full.
Everything is nicely labeled. Each bed has a sign like this. Unfortunately, it began to rain just as we got there, so I did not spend as much time as I might have liked, noticing the names of my favorites.
I don't know how many different varieties they have. LOTS.
The Arboretum's peony-garden subsite says that because the garden has historical significance, they do not have any of the newer colors of peonies (yellow? Really? I've never seen a yellow one). They stick to the white, pink, red range. (They also stick to herbaceous peonies, I think. I wasn't aware of seeing any tree peonies.)
I hope you like white and pink fluffy stuff, because there's going to be a lot of it, over the next few days.
At this point, it began to rain hard enough that we put the cameras in plastic bags. We had umbrellas, but............. (as always, click on any pic to embiggen)
Luckily the rain lightened up very quickly, and we felt safe getting the cameras back out.
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2 comments:
Goodness gracious, Vicki. Did I mention how lucky you are? Each and every one of those flowers and your photos is simply gorgeous. :)
Thanks. :-)
I'm so glad we went. I have a tendency to want everything to be Just Right. Going when the weather was threatening would not be my usual choice.
But so much better to have had a damp and hurried visit than none at all!
I was reading Peg Bracken's travel book, and, while I didn't agree with many things she said (it's very dated), one of her points is that people essentially never say "I shouldn't have gone." Better to gather one's self up and GO than to wait for all conditions to be perfect.
Very true. :-)
For the U's peony garden, as well as for France.
:-)
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