No, we didn’t actually see any dinosaurs yesterday but we did go on an extensive nature tour, featuring many enormous plants and bugs that made me feel like I’d walked into Isla Sorna. We decided to go to the Olympic Park area of Montreal (to the North-East of the city) and wanted to visit the Chateau Dufresne first.
So, we find this beautiful building, walk to the front door and find that the real entrance is in the back. Once we get to the back, we find out that it is only open Wed-Sun. We didn’t think to check to see if it would be open Monday because we just assumed it would be open all weekdays (there are actually many places in Montreal that aren’t open Monday – I guess they just really don’t like Mondays). Unfortunately we didn’t get to see that museum, but it worked out in the end because we need all the time we could get for the rest of the day (almost everything except restaurants, nightclubs and grocery stores closes at 6pm in Montreal).
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| Fountains in front of the Botanical Gardens |
We walked across the intersection to go to Montreal’s Botanical Garden. Again, we walked up to the front door to find that the real entrance was somewhere in the back. We headed towards the back when we saw this ridiculously strange, large dog sculpture and wandered over to see what it was:
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| "le woof" |
Behind it was hidden my favorite part of the day, the Garden of Senses. It is a garden specifically made for people who lack a sense, so each of the plants featured were chosen because of their unique feature to some sense. So most of them had cool textures, many had amazing smells (you rubbed their leaves with your hand to get the scent = your hand became covered in different smells and plant gunk). I thought it was a great idea and really liked how you could experience different aspects of the plants (and not just looking at them as you do in other places).
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| prickly flowers in the Garden of Senses |
The Botanical Gardens are massive, including a nine-greenhouse-chain, a Chinese Garden, Japanese Garden, Native American Garden and a tree greenhouse. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to go see all of it. We went through half of the green house (tropical plants and ferns) and it had some of the really large plants (trees, and many species of elephant ears) that gave it a prehistoric feel. They wouldn’t let you photograph any of it or I would have pictures for you. After, we went through a rose garden on our way to the Chinese gardens.
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| Rose from Rose Garden |
They were beautiful and had awesome Chinese architecture. It was really very cool.
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| Paper Bird in Chinese Garden |
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| The entrance to the Chinese Gardens |
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| Dream Lake, at the center of the gardens |
We were very expectant of the Japanese garden, but it focused more on rocks and the building than the garden (they had a tea garden closed off unless you went on the tour, but we didn’t have time for that). One of the exhibits was a gorgeous paper dress a woman made –I can’t imagine how time consuming that must have been, but it is absolutely beautiful. We did get to see their bonsai garden, which was pretty cool because I’d never realized how many types of bonsai there are.
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| cool tree outside the Japanese bldg |
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| paper dress |
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| bonsai tree |
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| weeping willow bonsai tree |
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| super old bonsai tree |
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| lollipop flowers (some of the same cool flowers from inside the greenhouse) |
Finally, we got to Alex’s most anticipated part, the Insectarium. It was kind of aimed more for kids but it had some amazing exhibits of enormous bugs. They had quite a few live specimens, but I was hoping there would be more half and half.
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mosquito caught in tree sap....echos of Jurassic Park... |
Praise the LORD, all his works everywhere in his dominion. Praise the LORD, my soul.
~ Psalm 103:22
p.s. I forgot that I got a fortune cookie in French and it told me: Vos principes vous important plus que l’argent ou le success = Your principles are more important to you than money or success :D
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