Sunday, August 16, 2009

Nature Study: Flowers

“What do parents owe their young that is more important than a warm and trusting connection to the Earth…?” - Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth

On Tuesday I took the kids for a nature walk to Innis Woods Metro Garden. This is a beautiful garden full of gorgeous displays of flowers. They have many, many different types of gardens at Innis Woods. On this particular day we choose to look at their Wildflower Garden and their Herb Garden.

The wildflower garden is really neat because in order to get to it you have to take a stroll down a boardwalk through the woods. On this walk we almost always see various birds, chipmunks, and frogs in the pond.

During the walk Marcus found a pinecone that he said he was going to feed to the animals. :)

Later the pinecone became a spaceship. Here he is flying it through the air:

When Marcus didn't find any animals to feed the pine-cone to, he decided to taste it himself! We decided that pinecones are yucky and not for eating. Here is a picture of Sophia holding up her finger and saying, "No, no, no!" to Marcus eating a pine-cone. She cracks me up!

Sophia then found an acorn and was very proud that she had something to feed the animals with too now. (Something they might actually eat! ;) )
Here she is holding up her acorn for the camera.

They kept their acorns and pine-cones with them for the rest of the walk.

Sometimes during our nature walk we will just stop and observe things in silence. This isn't any idea I had, it is actually something that the kids ask to do. Here is Marcus sitting on the boardwalk listening to the sounds of the woods. Very neat.

Later Marcus decided to be silly and lay on the boardwalk.

During our nature study we collected different leaves and talked about how each tree had a leaf in a different shape. I would like to put all of our leaves in a journal for them at some point.
Here are some pictures of the kids looking for leaves.

We stopped to pick some clover and smell it.

Finally we go to the wildflower garden! And it was gorgeous. Another great thing about this natural meadow is that you see the most beautiful birds and butterflies in it. I wasn't able to capture any on film...but they were very neat.

The nice thing about Innis Woods is that they did a very good job labeling most of the plant life. Even some trees are labeled in the woods. This makes it very easy to learn the names of the various plants.
Here are some of my favorite wildflowers we found in the garden.

After we explored the wild flower garden we headed over to the herb garden. This is one of my favorite places in the park. It smells divine! And it is neat to see all of the very pretty flowers that they choose for the garden. The herb garden is divided into a kitchen garden and a medical garden. I really learn a lot every time I go here.
It was very hot out this day. (About 90 degrees!) So we stopped in the herb drying gazebo to drink some water in the shade.

Marcus loves walking the various "secret" paths of the herb garden.

Leaving the park we found a very neat old stump that was huge. This was the best play structure that the park could have provided! The kids loved it!

One of my favorite shots:

1 comments:

Tony Rugare said...

Cathy,
Great blog, great pictures!
Love,
Grandpa

 

Blog Template by BloggerCandy.com