Atlanta Botanical Garden

I had probably chosen the wrong season to visit Atlanta's very extensive 30 acres of botanical garden.  In the Spring (and probably Summer if you could stand the up to 99F temperatures and extreme humidity) the garden must have been full of flowers.  Now only the hardiest remain and even a few late flowering roses had been cut down by the recent very cold nights.  So the beds were full of informative plant labels and not much else..  Fabulous colour though in this wonderful Dale Chihuly glass sculpture in the fountain garden and another one, depicting Southern plants .. such as the rather unusual pitcher plants .. suspended from the roof of the Visitor Centre.

At this time of year the garden is illuminated in the evening for visitors and so many of the trees and garden sculptures are wound around with fairy lights.

By the restaurant there was a cute but huge seasonally dressed grass sculpture of a dog (I think)..

He was around 10 feet tall and completely made of growing grass.

The garden has a substantial orchid collection - said to number some 10,000 species in all, divided over two orchid houses, one of which imitates the climate of the high altitude areas where the orchids growing there originate from.

There was a huge variety of orchids in flower - from huge blooms to tiny almost moss or grass like flowers.  I didn't photograph them all but here are some - together with other tropical plants growing alongside them - which caught my eye..

And just a few from the high altitude house..

And an extraordinary shrub from the same house..

An interesting postscript to the lack of outdoor colour in the Botanical Garden was this Camellia flowering happily - but surely unseasonally - in a small roadside garden in the centre of Atlanta..