Skip to main content

Grapevine Botanic Garden

For some reason our photos this year wound up being dumped in one large folder, imaginatively entitled 2012.  Nine months into the year, I finally have been getting around to categorising them, and thereby discovering a few blog posts I should have written.  This is one.


Grapevine Botanic Gardens is not on the scale of its Fort Worth or Dallas counterparts, being more of a glorified park, but a very pretty one nonetheless.  We first went there on a sunny Saturday earlier this year, after driving past the signpost many times, and it was packed with people taking bridal photos and picnicking on the grass.  We've been a few times since then, and every time Toby heads straight for the fountain with the handy toddler-height overflow.




Once we manage to detach him from that, the next stop is usually the pretty little pond system with footbridges, splashy waterfalls, and huge spotty fish.  On our latest visit we noticed a little snake nestled comfortably under a rock, too.





That was the time there were lizards everywhere, as well.  Green ones, brown ones, puffy-throated ones...  We watched with fascination as a male ever-so-slowly stalked a female through the branches of a plant.  Usually when we see a lizard it's, "oh look, there's a ..." rustle rustle rustle as it disappears into some leaves.  I had never seen one move so deliberately.







One of my favourite parts is this plant wall, with windowboxes forming a cascade of vegetation.  It looks like an ideal thing to jazz up a bare garden wall.  They also have a vertical arrangement which creates a very compact herb garden.  I'd love to try it one day!




Just over the road is Nash Farm, a modest plot of land containing a 19th century farmhouse and assorted farming paraphernalia.  Recently it hosted an Italian car show, where Lamborghinis lazed under the live oaks and Alfa Romeos rested next to rusty tractors.  Graham ogled the sports cars and dreamed about selling the house to buy a Ferrari, while Toby and I hung out on the porch and sipped lemonade in the sunshine. Everyone was happy!







Comments

Martha said…
Just to clarify Hon, if you're thinking the bottom photo's a Ferrari (just coz it's red), it isn't- it's a 1972 De Tomaso Pantera! Hubby
Martha said…
I wasn't even going to attempt to identify those car photos! If you're interested in that kind of thing you will know what they are.

Popular posts from this blog

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess.  This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story.  Everything went right and it was a lovely day.  For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong.  I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing.  Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off.  Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok.  But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know?  Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil.  Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the...

Anticipating

Come, my beloved,      let us go out into the fields      and lodge in the villages;     let us go out early to the vineyards      and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened      and the pomegranates are in bloom.  Song of Songs 7:11-12  The Bible passage comes first today, because it sets that tone of anticipation so well.  Let's go see!  Are there buds yet?  Are the flowers starting to open?  Is anything in full bloom? I love the anticipation of spring flowers.  First the dainty bobbing snowdrops, then the rainbow spikes of crocuses and the golden trumpets of daffodils.  Then the trees get in on the act.  The ornamental cherry with its over-exuberance of pink fluffy blossom is my favourite, and the waxy white magnolia which lasts for too short a time.  Every year the same pattern, and every year somethi...