An Autumn Day At The Garden

Each season I come out to the west side of the property at the Canadian Museum of Nature, where the Landscapes of Canada Gardens stands, to photograph the place as it goes from one season to the next. So I did again in late October. The Gardens are organized with plants, trees, grasses, and shrubs from four distinct ecosystems in the country. The first is Boreal Forest, seen here with trees along the way that represent the ecosystem covering a massive swath of the country.

At a couple of the entrances here are bricks, sometimes memorial and sometimes not, placed by families. Here are some.

Fall colours were coming along smoothly.

The second of the ecosystems, Prairie Grassland, had its long grasses and flowers fading in the fall sunlight, very different from how it is at its peak.

Turning back around, I liked how this leaf looked against the berry bush, part of the Boreal Forest area.

The path here goes under a sculpture, an iceberg in steel made by the late Canadian artist and inventor Bill Lishman.

Arctic Tundra is the next ecosystem, with grasses and plants of the far north transplanted into the area between the rocks at this portion of the Gardens. Over the course of the summer they grow well, but now that colder weather is coming, they're going dormant. The view here is from the sidewalk on the west side of the property.

The north side of the path as it curves towards the Museum has a group of three mammoths and the last ecosystem around it. Mammoth Steppe features plants still growing today that were around in the day of the mammoths, thousands of years ago.

The family of mammoths and their surrounding plants welcome one to the museum.

One last shot from the north side of the property includes the Queens Lantern. Inside hangs a scale model of the Moon. From here I was heading further downtown, and took some shots along the way. Those I'll show you in a coming post.