In the last weekend of April my Mom came to visit. Instead of scheduling a hike for Sunday I took her out to the Arboretum.
It was a beautiful spring day, everything was in bloom and the parking lot was almost full. After spending a couple of minutes in the Graham Visitors Center looking through brochures I took a map of the park ($1.00 donation). While there are several paths straight out of the center leading people on a network of trails east of the main Azalea Way, a grassy thoroughfare that runs straight through the park, I decided to avoid the crowds and walk south on Arboretum Drive East. One of the first plants we saw was a strange blossoming tree (shown here) that wasn’t identified, which was a bummer since the great thing about coming to this park is to see all the exotic and native plants (about 10,000) and most are tagged.
We continued on a series of small trails avoiding the crowds winding our way through the Japanese Maples (one of my favorite trees), Rhododendrons, Ashes, Camellias and found ourselves on the south end of the park in a new exhibit called the Pacific Connections Garden.
While the garden was just planted and in its infancy it displays plants from around the Pacific Rim (U.S. Pacific Northwest, Chile, China, New Zealand and Australia). Its center piece of this garden is an interpretive shelter constructed with the support of the Pomegranate Center and features a green roof. After a couple of minutes looking at the information displayed in the shelter we made our way to Azalea Way. It was a quick return and previewed many of the gardens that we saw from the other side with the addition of pond features and gardens on the west side of the park. The return to the visitor center was quick, which was good since we both were getting hungry.
In short, a great walk through a beautiful park that I will visit many times again.
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