Gardens In Spring

 Each season I stop by at the Canadian Museum of Nature to photograph the Landscapes of Canada Gardens. Earlier this week I stopped in to pay a visit late one afternoon, arriving first at the east end of the property, where a statue set of a mother and baby dinosaur are found.

Note the dog in the background at left in this shot. You wonder what they think of the dinosaurs.

Here we have the main entrance of the Museum, with tulips lining the path.

The Gardens are on the west side of the property, and feature plants, flowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees from four distinct ecosystems in the country. The first is the Mammoth Steppe. Alongside a set of statues depicting a mammoth family are plants that were growing in the time of these animals. They continue to grow today.

A wider view, with the Museum in the background. The glass tower is called the Queens Lantern, and contains a model of the Moon.

Arctic Tundra is the next ecosystem, with plants of the far north growing among large rocks at the western edge of the Gardens. They do quite well in Ottawa.

I always try to photograph this shot when I do this series- taken from the roadway on the west side, featuring shrubs and bushes of the tundra, along with the sculpture that bisects the path.

It is a stainless steel iceberg, the work of the late Canadian artist and inventor Bill Lishman.

Prairie Grasslands is the next ecosystem. Over the course of the summer, the grasses transplanted here grow long.

The last of the four ecosystems is Boreal Forest, which occupies a vast swath of the country. Birch trees are just starting to leaf out, as are tamaracks, a type of tree with needles that go gold in the fall and drop.