Making our way to Kingsbrae Garden

While Selena was living in Hamilton, with Aunty Belle, doing her first B.A., we several times thought of going to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens there. Years past, however, and we never somehow got around to it. Now, on the far east side of the country I saw a brochure in a tourist info stop for Kingsbrae Gardens, express mild interest, and low and behold a few days later I am there. It turns out it was about the same distance from St George (where we were staying), as Hamilton is from where we live our regular lives now, just to add to the irony.

It turned out to be a gorgeous, bright day. And it was after all a garden, so it couldn't be bad. Could it? A sort of neat, lawn-long fountain greeted us. And a great cedar hedge with a hole in it... honestly, my expectations weren't very high for this garden in the middle of nowhere in this little town in the extreme south-east corner of New Brunswick. But as I say, it's a garden, so it couldn't be entirely bad. The first hint that there might be something unusually interesting in store was glimpsed merely by looking to the left or the right while going through the cedar hedge portal (click the picture to see): the incredible mass of twisted and gnarled roots and trunks holding up the smooth, clean, perfectly trimmed green wall was awesome. Welcome to the faerie world...

A faerie world indeed! The Kingsbrae Garden turned out not just to be a garden of beautiful flowers and plants and paths and landscape, but also a wonderland of sculptural and other artistic creativity. For example, the indescribably fantastic teapot trees. Each teapot bears and eye (it seemed fantastically to me), and bristles with flowers. So fantastic. In another area a huge dazzling cow bell tree... it was amazing. I'm going to have a hard time selecting just a few of my favourite pictures from this day. And I'm not sure any of them do justice to the experience of the place; having all of these things together, in the setting of a garden. But look anyhow...

Behold, the Flowerpot People! Very friendly indeed. Very gracious hosts indeed. Call me mad, but I found them to be very clever indeed. Indeed! Then, to the right, a massive mobile. Iron, glass, and rocks; turning gently in the sun. (Click picture for a close up of one of the dangling arms.)

I don't know what to call this "tree", with it's iron leaves and glorious blue glass bulbs. A magic tree. But with the garden dragon, I must for now flee...

Where is Istra...? Is that her arm colourfully intruding into the fountain picture above...? Where did she go?