Detail from Student Furniture Project on Display on Campus
Winter is not yet here, but the first snow fall of the season has come and left a blanket covering our dormant flowers and crowning the colorful berries our birds have not yet needed. This is a special time in the garden and gets me thinking about visitors..
Unless a public garden features something like a light display or a holiday display or a garden railroad, visitation to public gardens drops precipitously in the cooler weather. Late fall, winter and early spring are quiet in many ways in a public garden and in the Ambler Arboretum this is certainly true.
While this peaceful quiet is welcome for a bit, we look forward to the day the grounds are crawling with visitors, looking for the colors in the winter landscape; when people visit just to admire the diversity of bark textures in our tree collections and people with dogs in jackets explore the grounds looking at the details that come to the forefront because their brightly colored, petaled competition has taken a break.
There is more to our garden than the plants. Take a slow walk around the grounds and look for the art, and the hidden words carved in to the bases of sculptures. Look for the artistic remnants of flower show exhibits past, scattered around the arboretum finding new life in a new context.
Of course, we want you to enjoy the plants in all seasons – marvel at their transformations throughout the year as we do, leave your footprints in our snowy landscape and cool off in the shade of our large woodland trees. But there is really so much more to our Arboretum than the plants.
I invite you to come and take a walk around, look at our plants – marvel at their beauty in any season but also, take a look around secret corners and hidden nooks and see what else you can find.
