It’s been a drab, dreary, almost snowless winter. My camera keeps asking me to take it for a walk and I keep ignoring it. But, I finally decided to get out and go for a walk in a garden. That probably seems like a strange place to take walk in the winter in Wisconsin. You don’t have to be a botanist to know that the odds of seeing flowers here this time of year are low, very low indeed. Be that as it may, I went for a winter walk in Olbrich Botanical Gardens.
I’ve been to Olbrich many times before. It has sixteen acres of outdoor gardens filled with “Midwest-hardy” plants. Despite the lack of flowers, the garden proved to be very interesting. It was rather cold and, as you can see in this photo, the sky was stubbornly determined to remain gray. Walking from the lobby of the Olbrich visitor center out into the garden, I immediately encountered a “Christmas Tree” made of reused plant materials wrapped around a teepee-like frame constructed of a dozen or more long branches. This was sitting in the middle of a large round planter that holds live plants in the summer. Though the holidays were long past, it still added a little cheer to the start of my walk.
I must admit that I really hadn’t noticed or paid attention to sculpture and other art work in the garden before. But, due to the lack of leaves and the absence of flowers, I immediately spotted some interesting things. One sculpture appeared to show the unfurling of ferns in the springtime. Another was a cute little elephant, not bothered at all by the Wisconsin weather.
(In a group of two or three photos, you can click on any one to enlarge it.)
Although I had seen the pint-sized pachyderm before, I don’t recall ever seeing this … uh … big leaf?
Decorating the garden with the remains of some of last summer’s plants was an interesting idea. The golden grasses and ferns added a nice colorful touch to the otherwise drab surroundings.
As you can see in the first picture below, it was quite crowded in the garden when I was there. When I was crossing the bridge over Starkweather Creek, I saw a couple in the distance. They didn’t seem to mind sharing the garden with me. In the summer, the bridge railings are thickly covered with leaves from a long torturously-twisting vine. This time of year, however, the structure of the iron railings is easy to see. From this bridge you always get a nice view of the Thai Pavilion, which I’ve photographed countless times over the years. The gold leaf on the beautiful pavilion seemed to imitate the gold leaves in some of the nearby planters. It looked warm and welcoming even on this gray day.
From the Thai Pavilion you can look back towards Starkweather Creek and see the hibernating forms of a fountain and reflecting pond in the foreground. It started to snow again, which dusted the air with white flakes.
Back across the creek, the garden displayed more decorated flower pots. My walk then entered an area where, according to the Olbrich Gardens website, it becomes a “shady garden path, embraced by more than 100 native paper birch…” It was too overcast for me to enjoy the shade, but the path did casually sway back and forth through many birch trees. Farther down the path I saw an interesting device consisting of a box filled with the stems of dead plants. The accompanying sign said “SAVE HOLLOW STEMS = SAVING HOMES FOR BEES.”
The weather continued to get colder. It was time to finish my walk before the image stabilizer on my camera could no longer counter the shivering of my body. Despite the cold and gray, it turned out to be an interesting walk.
To see how the gardens look during a prettier time of the year, please Click Here.