Late Autumn Within The Garden

Each season, I like to photograph the Landscapes Of Canada Gardens at the Canadian Museum of Nature to show things from that seasonal point of view. I was passing through the area one sunny day early last month and decided to take advantage of the clear skies. The Gardens consist of plants from four distinctive ecosystems in Canada. The first is Boreal Forest, with the trees, bushes, and shrubs one finds in the vast belt of woodland.

The golden tree you see above and below in this shot is a tamarack. It looks like a coniferous tree, but is in fact a deciduous tree- its leaves have the shape of needles and turn a deep golden yellow late in the fall before falling, usually after the bulk of the regular leaves are down.

Prairie Grassland follows, with the grasses and flowers one finds in the west planted here and growing well over the course of the summer.

This work of art spans the pathway, an iceberg in steel by the late artist Bill Lishman.

Over at one entrance, a number of bricks can be found with the names of people who have donated for  this, mostly families or those doing so in memory of another. I like how autumn leaves look against the bricks.

This view of the Museum and the iceberg is from the sidewalk. The third ecosystem, Arctic Tundra, is represented in the plants and shrubs planted amid the rocks on this side of the path. They're residents of the far north, and yet do quite well in an Ottawa growing season as well.

The path carries on, with Prairie Grassland at the right. On the left are plants that were present in North America thousands of years ago and remain present today. Mammoth Steppe is the last of the ecosystems making up the Gardens. A statue set of a family of three mammoths, life sized, are by the path. They were moved here from their original position, close to the iceberg, when the Gardens were devised. They're surrounded by the plants that the real mammoths would have been consuming around the time of the last ice age.