Monday 9 September 2019

Birmingham Botanical Gardens

Hi there everyone 😀

After the loveliest morning ever at Winterbourne House & Gardens on the University of Birmingham site, we were heading literally just down the road to spend the afternoon at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

We started with a very nice lunch in The Pavilion Tea Room where we decided on our route round the gardens to make sure that we got to see everything we wanted to see ... and there did seem to be plenty.

Straight away we could see how different it was to Winterbourne ... far more open, teeming with families and feeling more like a traditional municipal park, than a 'garden'.
We decided to make our way round the outside of the gardens in an anti-clockwise direction heading past the 'Half Moon Bed' ...
and down to the 'Herbaceous Border', which was bursting with late summer colour ...

We then headed through the children's playground and into the 'Cottage Garden' of 'Teulon Cottage', which was a real treat ...

We continued on our way down to the bottom of the garden, wandering through the 'Rock Garden & Memory Pool', understanding completely why it was all fenced off and gated as the footpath led to a spot where one foot wrong and we would have ended up very wet ...

The next stop was the 'Scarecrow Garden' and I was really looking forward to seeing this, following our fab day out a few weeks ago at the Elford Scarecrow Festival. I couldn't have been more disappointed ... just one scarecrow ... and not even really a proper scarecrow at that, though he did have a certain charm ...
We were now pretty much at the bottom of the garden and Jackie, Martin and I had a sit in the sunshine, whilst Phil braved the 'Butterfly House'.

We started to head back up the other side of the garden passing lots of vibrant colour along the way ...

We went through the avaries and into the 'Rose Garden', where Jackie was keen to avoid the local residents who were roaming free, though wouldn't stand still for long enough to get a decent shot ...

By the time we were making our way back up towards the terrace the peacocks had had quite enough of visitors and retreated up a nearby tree ... something that we were quite fascinated with ...
We were now pretty much back where we started ...

We took in a quick look back over the 'Main Lawn' to the 'Lawn Aviary' ...

... and the 'Bandstand' ...
... before having a last look in the glasshouses ...
We had spent the loveliest of days together, plenty of sunshine, a fair bit of exercise and got to see two brand new gardens.

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Would I visit the Botanical Gardens again? To be fair I probably wouldn't. I much preferred the intimacy, calm and tranquility of somewhere like Winterbourne ... if you've got kids though, the Botanical Gardens is fab ... loads of open space to run around and picnic, plenty of play areas and lots of nooks and crannies to explore and plenty of interesting things for little people to enjoy 😀

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1 comment:

  1. I wish for the great of success in all of our destiny endeavors

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking time to comment on my blog. I love to hear what people think about what Martin and I have been up to.