An Autumn Stroll In The Gardens

To the Illuminati spammer who's been hitting this page and others I read, I believe I speak on behalf of so many people when I make the following suggestion to you. Get yourself out on a boat. Head out to deep waters in the ocean. Something with a mile or two down to the bottom. Sit down, put your feet into a deep tray. Pour cement into the tray. When it's dry, shuffle over to the stern and throw yourself overboard.

The grounds of the Canadian Museum of Nature are ideal for fall colours. On the east side, a sculpture of a mother and baby dinosaur, the species chasmosaurus irvinensis, are located.

On the west side of the museum are the Landscapes Of Canada Gardens. This presents the plants of four distinct ecosystems along a pathway. It starts with a trio of mammoths, life sized, and the plants around them all from the time these animals walked the earth. It is called the Mammoth Steppe.

The museum dates back more than a century, first built as a memorial museum for Queen Victoria. It's seen more than one use over time, but exclusively houses galleries focused on nature now.

Some of the plants of the time of the mammoths have carried on long after those ice age animals departed from this world. They do quite well here now.

Across the path from the mammoths is the largest of the four areas, the Prairie Grassland. Its mix of grasses and flowers grew well this year.

I crossed to the sidewalk to the west to get this view of the museum. An iceberg sculpture of steel looms over the path, and the plants in the foreground are all part of the next ecosystem present here: Arctic Tundra. Amid the rocks, shrubs and plants native to the far north thrive here over the summer.

This is back on the path. The red of the trees at the far end of the Prairie Grassland stood out.

The last of the four ecosystems present in the Gardens is Boreal Forest. Bushes and ferns are seen here, at the end of their annual growing cycle.

These fall colours are across the path, typical of boreal woodlands. The museum itself is just visible in the background.

I took another view of the museum from this area.

This is a visual treat this time of year. Tamaracks may look like coniferous trees, with their needles, but they are in fact deciduous trees. The green needles turn gold late in the fall. These trees exist widely in the vast stretches of the boreal forest in Canada, and can be found in some parts of the United States, as far south as West Virginia.

A final view of the museum from the path. I'll next show them at some point in the winter, and am probably going to be paying a visit inside before that. December and January are good months to fill a photoblog with museum posts, after all. Tomorrow is Hallowe'en, so we'll pick up with fall colours after that- my theme day post has several shots with fall colours in the background around a brown object. That brown object is something you've seen before, but you'll get no further clues out of me.