Zilker Botanical Gardens in Austin, TX

As I waited for the clock to move to 6:30 pm on Monday,
September 15, I decided to walk around the Zilker Botanical
Gardens. This is not my first time touring these wonderful and
well-kept gardens but it is the first time this year. I was not
disappointed as even this late in the summer, there were flowers
of every description still in bloom. It helped that the weather
had been reasonably kind to us and we had only a handful
of one hundred degree days.

I took well over a hundred pictures in my leisurely stroll around the grounds. That’s the beauty of the modern camera, you never run out of film. As long as the memory card is not full up and the batteries are charged, you can click away forever….

It never fails to amaze me how the Gardeners at the Botanical Gardens manage to get the plants to grow so big and tall. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get the English Fern to grow more than six inches high and yet I took pictures of the stuff standing two feet tall. I suspect that they use an unlimited supply of water out of Ladybird Lake to make their things grow so well.

It is not all well-kept gardens as there is a large area that is natural with the trees and underbrush growing as it normally does. There are wonderful gravel pathways built to explore this magic place and they make a nice contrast to the greenery surrounding them. There is yet another area that contains a Blacksmith shop, another for a one-roomed log school-house and yet another that contains an old single roomed log cabin. These are all reminders of the past and really make us realize just how tough it must have been way back then and comparatively speaking, how easy we have it.

Zilker Botanical Gardens September 2014 from Francis Allcorn on Vimeo.

These are beautiful and well-maintained gardens and well worth the trip.