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mistressofmuses) wrote2024-10-16 08:34 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2024-10-16 08:34 pm
Tuesday, October 08: Hudson Gardens
Last week Alex and I went back to Hudson Gardens, a free botanical garden. We went back in the spring, but at the time it was a little too early for a lot of the stuff we wanted to see. This time we were too late! But it was nice to go anyway.
The gardens are doing a seasonal event, "The Magic of the Jack-o-Lanterns" or something to that effect. It's a paid, ticketed event at night, but you can walk through the setup during the day as part of the regular free admission.
The Halloween setup is pretty cool - tons of carved (foam) pumpkins. (But pretty good realistic fake pumpkins!) Unfortunately, it does block a couple areas of the garden off even more than they already were. (This year they've roped some sections off for reseeding and to reestablish areas that have been eroded. I can't be mad about that, but it's sad not to be able to get to all the usual things. The event stuff ropes some of the things like the beehives off entirely, so you can't approach them at all.)
We were too late for some of the stuff I'd hoped to see, like the water lilies (which we were too early for in the spring), but the roses were having a fantastic second bloom! The single frost we had last month seems to have done away with the Japanese beetles that were devouring them earlier in the year, so they were doing great now!
Always love bees on flowers.
I also really liked this rose. The picture only sort of does justice to just how enormous it was!
A very perfect yellow rose.
A purple rose.
This rose bud looked near perfect.
Another bee! On the nice candy-stripe roses. Sticking out her little tongue.
Obligatory picture of the cool steampunk-y kaleidoscope sculpture.
It's still pointed at the pot of little cacti, but they've grown a lot since the spring!
And a view through the kaleidoscope.
Not a great picture, but a very cute little jumping spider on the admin building.
After this we went and got coffee at the little cafe. It was really good, ha.
Most of the rest of the grounds were taken up by the pumpkin displays, which I put under a separate cut. But there was one other area that you could walk through that was past the Halloween setup, so we headed that way. I wanted to see a frog, dammit!
And we did! Three bullfrogs, actually. I didn't get a picture of it, but one of them was absolutely ENORMOUS. Like a damn dinner plate! The other two were much smaller, and did adorable "EEP!"s before plopping into the water to escape.
The little "mountain stream" area had a bunch of crayfish. This one was neat - very red, and just letting the waterfall burble over him while he reached up to grab things as they floated by, haha.
When we headed back the way we'd come, one of the smaller bullfrogs had come back. And it started to rain a bit, so some little ripples, too.
And a very impressive family of wood ducks. I think there were 11 of them total that we counted? Maybe 12? (Not all in this picture.) It looked like most of them were young, so this may have been one very successful family group.
And there were the pumpkins! Like I mentioned above, they are foam pumpkins rather than real ones. They're good fakes, and it makes sense. If you want the displays to last the whole month, real ones certainly wouldn't!
Lots of the displays were things like pop culture figures that I didn't really care about too much, but some of them were really neat.
Edgar Allan Poe was certainly an appropriate choice, imo.
I liked the pirate ship with all the kraken tentacles!
And next to that, more ocean-themed scenes. The lighthouse is cool, and I really like the narwhal. Also the sharks! And the jellyfish!
A fun local one: Blucifer! Our terrifying, locally famous sculpture! I love him!
Another "scene" I really liked: dinosaurs!
More dinosaurs!
A bunch of very cute insects.
I didn't care about most of the pop-culturey ones, but I of course was delighted by The Addams Family.
The little scarecrow coven setup was also neat. (Wish my phone hadn't decided that the orange should be REALLY ORANGE, but alas.)
A graveyard, part 1.
A graveyard, part 2.
And a cute little penguin setup on the little island!
The gardens are doing a seasonal event, "The Magic of the Jack-o-Lanterns" or something to that effect. It's a paid, ticketed event at night, but you can walk through the setup during the day as part of the regular free admission.
The Halloween setup is pretty cool - tons of carved (foam) pumpkins. (But pretty good realistic fake pumpkins!) Unfortunately, it does block a couple areas of the garden off even more than they already were. (This year they've roped some sections off for reseeding and to reestablish areas that have been eroded. I can't be mad about that, but it's sad not to be able to get to all the usual things. The event stuff ropes some of the things like the beehives off entirely, so you can't approach them at all.)
We were too late for some of the stuff I'd hoped to see, like the water lilies (which we were too early for in the spring), but the roses were having a fantastic second bloom! The single frost we had last month seems to have done away with the Japanese beetles that were devouring them earlier in the year, so they were doing great now!
Always love bees on flowers.
I also really liked this rose. The picture only sort of does justice to just how enormous it was!
A very perfect yellow rose.
A purple rose.
This rose bud looked near perfect.
Another bee! On the nice candy-stripe roses. Sticking out her little tongue.
Obligatory picture of the cool steampunk-y kaleidoscope sculpture.
It's still pointed at the pot of little cacti, but they've grown a lot since the spring!
And a view through the kaleidoscope.
Not a great picture, but a very cute little jumping spider on the admin building.
After this we went and got coffee at the little cafe. It was really good, ha.
Most of the rest of the grounds were taken up by the pumpkin displays, which I put under a separate cut. But there was one other area that you could walk through that was past the Halloween setup, so we headed that way. I wanted to see a frog, dammit!
And we did! Three bullfrogs, actually. I didn't get a picture of it, but one of them was absolutely ENORMOUS. Like a damn dinner plate! The other two were much smaller, and did adorable "EEP!"s before plopping into the water to escape.
The little "mountain stream" area had a bunch of crayfish. This one was neat - very red, and just letting the waterfall burble over him while he reached up to grab things as they floated by, haha.
When we headed back the way we'd come, one of the smaller bullfrogs had come back. And it started to rain a bit, so some little ripples, too.
And a very impressive family of wood ducks. I think there were 11 of them total that we counted? Maybe 12? (Not all in this picture.) It looked like most of them were young, so this may have been one very successful family group.
And there were the pumpkins! Like I mentioned above, they are foam pumpkins rather than real ones. They're good fakes, and it makes sense. If you want the displays to last the whole month, real ones certainly wouldn't!
Lots of the displays were things like pop culture figures that I didn't really care about too much, but some of them were really neat.
Edgar Allan Poe was certainly an appropriate choice, imo.
I liked the pirate ship with all the kraken tentacles!
And next to that, more ocean-themed scenes. The lighthouse is cool, and I really like the narwhal. Also the sharks! And the jellyfish!
A fun local one: Blucifer! Our terrifying, locally famous sculpture! I love him!
Another "scene" I really liked: dinosaurs!
More dinosaurs!
A bunch of very cute insects.
I didn't care about most of the pop-culturey ones, but I of course was delighted by The Addams Family.
The little scarecrow coven setup was also neat. (Wish my phone hadn't decided that the orange should be REALLY ORANGE, but alas.)
A graveyard, part 1.
A graveyard, part 2.
And a cute little penguin setup on the little island!
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The crayfish was a lot of fun to watch, too.
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I love the Poe!
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They did a lot, that's impressive
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The pumpkin displays were pretty cool! I'm sure they're neat when they're all lit up at night, too. It definitely at least looked like something worthwhile.