Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Our little outing

A collage of some of the more exotic blooms that we saw at the National Botanic Garden last week.

A honeybee collecting nectar.

A tortoiseshell butterfly.

A bumble bee in the kitchen garden.


The National Botanic Garden of Wales is home to the world's largest single span glasshouse.

You've got to love the Welsh! It's the law that all signs have to be bi-lingual. I guess they tried.
As well as the gardens proper there was a walk through an ancient woodland. According to the maps the walk took you past a waterfall. Now I'm rather fond of waterfalls so I insisted we went that way. Estimated time for the walk said 60 minutes. We looked at the map and pooh-poohed that. 'It won't take us that long. That's probably for old people who like to stop and rest. (Or admire the view as I call it.)'

So off we set. 

Some time later we were wondering when we were going to reach this waterfall. It didn't appear on the map we had with us but from what we could remember on the large noticeboard we must surely have reached it by now.

Then we saw this:

'Is that it?' To say it was two feet high was being generous. We sighed, took photos and walked on. 

Another sign in the woods described the work done by the land-owner and garden designer to create what had once been an area of bridges, waterfalls and shady brooks. 'Now most has disappeared but you can still see the stunning waterfall  if you follow the path ahead.'

Yippee, that titchy little thing hadn't been the waterfall we were looking for. We marched on, new determination in our hearts. Only to see this:


Now I know July was unseasonably dry but to have dried up so completely?
More sighs and resignation that we'd chosen the wrong time of year to look for a waterfall.

And then ... then ... we heard it!
Ta-dah!

 
Okay, not the biggest or most impressive waterfall we'd ever seen but as Husband said, they'd managed our expectations well as anything higher than us and not dry was going to look good at this point.

It took us a good hour to complete the walk. I blame it on my flip-flops. Not ideal hiking boots.

The latter part of the walk took us through meadows from which you could see the Teletubbies dome of the glasshouse.
 And brought us into a close encounter with some rather scary-looking sheep. (Not scary you say? look into the eyes of the one at the back and tell me that!)



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