Backyard Wonderland (A/C BP #3)

Among the posts asked to be completed by us as a class, so far this one is my favorite. For those in the audience who have no idea what I’m talking about, my class met this past Monday in the H.O. Botanical Gardens at the Penn State Arboretum. Arboretum…that still leaves a funny feeling in my mouth, and I can never remember to say it right. Ha, so anyway, back on track. The gardens are pretty much just that. Some neat pathways take the wandering individual through an easy to navigate mismatch of gardens featuring too many plants for me to name. I guess I’ll just take you on a textual walk through of the place, practice some imagery use, that sort of thing. 

I have the fortune of basically living across the street from the Arboretum, so having class there on Monday was wonderful. I slept in a little. Loved it... I had the fortune of stumbling across the gardens before when I arrived on campus, so I knew my way around and knew it was just going to be a good experience. 

I took the more scenic route across the street and through the field. While I didn’t cross directly, there was some cut grass that marked a sort of pathway to the fountain. The fountain looks especially great at night with the lights on, the water shining and all. So anyway I went through and to my right there was bamboo and other nifty things I don’t know the names of. Fun fact our teacher shared, bamboo grows fast, so fast it can be used as means of torture. A victim placed over a rack over the bamboo shoots will eventually have the bamboo grow up through him. Yea, painful stuff…There was a pond to the left path with just about every color water lily I could imagine (blue, yellow, pink, white? I think that’s most of them). The center path then divides into an oval around the event lawn. It’s a lawn, nothing special there. The left path leads off to a sundial sculpture, sunflower field, and overhand of vines and gourds. The flowers here were particularly vibrant in color. The right path swings around to the observation deck. It’s not called that, but that’s the idea. There’s another sculpture here of Nittany Valley and its waterways. In all, it’s something that needs to be experienced rather than told about. 

I’ve visited the Arboretum a few times before. I’ve just been stressed with starting college. It happens, and I have this little sanity center across the street to help me with it. I can’t say I love it just yet (I’m too eager to see it when it’s finished), but I can say it does help bring some peace of mind. Locations like this are one reason to love nature. You’d never see it in the wild, I don’t think, the mixture of plants, but the smell of flowers was something relaxing, all of them melded together. I like nature without the bugs, basically. Maybe it was just without them because of the time of year, but that’s fine by me! It’s funny I can’t say much about it when there is so much going on. Maybe it’s because I’m sick, haha. It’s peaceful there, and that’s what I like most about it.

 

My title probably doesn't make sense besides my post being as vague as a dream. I'm thinking of the animals that I've seen running around: chipmunks, rabbits, birds, bees, and some other little thing I never got a good look at... Down the rabbit hole, I kept thinking as I walked through the Arboretum.

 

I’ll probably be over there at least a dozen more times before the semester is over, rain or shine. I want to show my mother the Arboretum when she visits. She used to have a sort of garden at home when she was a stay-at-home mom. That all changed once my brothers and I were old enough to manage ourselves when it came to school, and the garden lost its touch a little. Her work from the past has lasted though. Our backyard at home is always green, fenced in GREEN! Spring and summer bring on the array of hues from the flowers below. I don’t spend a lot of time “in nature” but when I do I always find it easy to get away from the world. Bringing others with me would be a circumstantial thing. As of now, I go for the solitude and quiet. Even with the roar not even a block away, I can escape the busy atmosphere of the campus and just breathe a little. I hope this post isn’t too disappointing, reader. It’s just something I’m having trouble putting to words. Take a visit on your own some time. You’ll understand precisely what I mean.