The Flowers Is Is at the Botanic Garden

From top to bottom: The bird of paradise,the indoor courtyard,the banana tree,the tour,springtime in February,and the notorious Devil’s Tongue



By the Queen of Free

OMGGS!

For a respite from the normal workaday world, for a breath of springtime in February, for a change of scenery, the angelic, the paradisaical Botanic Garden at the foot of Capitol Hill offers the weary a song, a pleasant trip into another space of fragrance, beauty, loveliness, and the color of rejuvenation: green.

On Monday Marjorie Abbot, Garden volunteer,led a small group on a delightful tour, providing a brief history of the sanctuary and explanations about a few (time constraints) of its 26,000(!)plants. We saw the “Devil’s Tongue” (so perfectly named)with its horrid smell (everyone took Marjorie's word for it, and nobody tested her truthfulness), hundreds of orchids, medicinal plants bountiful, cacti, and we smelled the uplifting, the magnificent fragrance of the hyacinth.

What a celestial contrast the Botanic Garden presents compared to the brown, the empty, the languor of the outdoors only a few steps away.

The short trip to another world on my lunch break brought to mind these words:

Spring has sprung
The grass is riz
I wonder where the flowers is

Perhaps written by Edna St. Vincent Millay or Ogden Nash. They sound more like Nash, don't you think?