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Maine Botanical Gardens

We were fortunate for our visit to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens this year.  The day was mostly overcast (which gave us a softer light) and the wind was fairly calm (which allowed us to take some flower pictures). 

You might wonder why it takes us a while to put these trip reports up.  For some things, such as pictures from around our house, it is a combination of making the time and thinking of it.  But for these photography vacations, it is more complicated.  We take literally thousands of pictures.  Some of those are just playing or experiments, but most are decent photographs.  From those, we have to select a subset that we 'develop'.  If you shoot jpeg pictures, your camera does the development for you.  We shoot in 'raw' so we have to do that step ourselves.  After that, we then have to select yet a smaller subset of developed pictures to put up on this site.  And it is difficult to select which ones!  Using this vacation as an example, we took about 2500 photos, developed about 750 of them, and are posting roughly 100.  I mention this now because the Gardens are a good example of a difficult time selecting pictures. 

At the entrance to the Children's Garden (one of the gardens within the Main Botanical Gardens) is a quote by Miss Rumphius:

Make the world more beautiful

We were not familiar with this book, but Miss Rumphius planted flowers as part of her efforts to make the world more beautiful.  And there were many beautiful flowers in the gardens.  And some very interesting ones.  This unique flower greeted us at the entrance.

Tall flower above tulips

The tulips were prolific.

Field of pink tulips

Orange tulips

Stem of white flowers

In addition to flowers, there are also some interesting statues.  Included in the statues was an adorable rabbit

Rabbit statue

A sleepy Earth Giant

Rock Head on ground

Mother Earth

Mother Earth status

A close-up of The Cod Father (we've shown you the full version in previous years):

Cod Father statue close-up

A rock lightly carved to be a whale, in the Children's Garden.

Whale Rock

Getting back to the flowers, the relatively still air allowed some close-ups.

Yellow Flower

Pink flowers

Grape Hyacinth

Hellebore

Not only bees pollinate flowers:

Insect on purple flower

There is a fountain in one section of the garden, with water cascading up.  Since it came through the pool to go into the air, it changed shapes frequently.  Paul captured it looking to us like a horse that is rearing!

Fountain water looks like a rearing horse

Here is Paul demonstrating how to use the Mushroom Table (check out the chair):

Paul at a stone table

A hungry woodpecker was near us at one point.  In this picture, you can see that it has pulled out some bugs from the tree.

Woodpecker with meal

The Rhododendron Garden Waterfall was running, so we should include a couple of photos of that.  It adds a lovely sound to the garden.

Waterfall in garden

Waterfall in Maine Botanical Garden

Now for this trip...

 

Updated July 2020