Durham University Botanical Gardens~ May 2018

Posted in Adventures, Fuji, FujiX-T2, gardens, landscape, macro, nature, orchid, photography, uncategorised, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , , ,

At the beginning of May, Sophie and I went off to the Botanical Gardens at Durham University.  I can’t say Durham is my favourite place to drive through (which you have to do to get to the gardens) as it’s olde worlde charm rapidly disappears when you have to navigate traffic bottlenecks on tiny roads on busy days. But we got to the gardens without too much stress and we were lucky enough to have a sunny day.  There’s a large carpark near to the back entrance and a notice in it telling visitors to the gardens that the car park is free if they give their registration number to the garden’s pay desk, which I did. It cost £4 to get into the gardens.

The gardens are set in 10 hectares (which is 25 acres, not sure about feet/meters etc 🙂 ) of mature woodlands, and was opened by Dame Margot Fonteyn for reasons unbeknownst to me in 1970. I would have gone for Alan Titchmarsh meself 😀

After we paid our entrance fee we started out surrounded by magnificent tulips, they looked glorious in the sunshine.

 

loved the serrated edges on these next ones

 

and the blobs of purple  on these

 

the first bit we visited was a big greenhouse thingy (called a glasshouse I believe) where they had exotic plants, cactii or cactuses (whatever) and the place was hot and humid. There was a button you could press that made a fine mist cover everything and everyone, which I pressed a couple of times soaking the family who was ahead of us while I hid behind a cheeseplant 😀  (note to self- grow up!).

prickle plants

 

cheeseplant

 

lily-to-be

 

Greens

There was also a  pond in the glass house which was full of fish.

🙂

 

Nice with chips 🙂

 

There was another pond with a huge lily pad on it, but sadly no lilies were out yet

 

It did have a crocodile head in it though so that was the consolation prize.

See you later…

There were some lovely orchids in the glasshouse too

Alien

 

Other alien

 

This little chap was in a glasshouse all on his own

Kermit

 

but he had plenty to eat…

Sunday Lunch 😀

That’ll do for today, but stay tooned for when we visit the grounds and have a wander about.

all pictures can be embiggened by the flick of click 🙂

 

26 thoughts on “Durham University Botanical Gardens~ May 2018”

  3. I’m glad I also follow you on Twitter else I would have missed out on this post, that for some weird reason doesn’t show up on the wordpress reader (seriously wordpress is really annoying this week 😭😭).
    But enough about that: Incredible the talent you have in making these photographs, these are such works of art: seriously amazing 😊😊 Loved the alien pictures 😀 Keep making these wonderful pictures, they are worth it every time 😊😊

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  6. Amazing pictures as always!! I love those orchids, especially!! 💖💖 I would ABSOLUTELY soak the family in from of me! You can’t have a button like that and not expect people to push it!!! Please, NEVER GROW UP!!, 💖💖💖🍻

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  9. Pingback: Durham Botanical Gardens ~ May 2018 ~ part 2 – fraggle
  10. Pingback: Botanical Gardens ~ May 2018 ~ Bluebell edition – fraggle

  13. The greenes are spectacular! lovely detail dear Fragglerocking. It is not strange than in architecture English type gardens are taught across the world. Those and the Japanese ones are my favourites.

    Liked by 1 person

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