I promised myself that I wouldn’t take too many pictures today. Alas, I failed miserably. One of our stops was the Rose Garden in the botanical gardens, where Duncan found the theme for today’s post.

We started the day by walking up to the Cable Car Museum where we were treated to views over Wellington.

From there, it was a short walk to the botanical gardens. It isn’t as wild as Zealandia, but there are still lots of quiet paths and opportunities to take pictures. Lots of pictures. I’ll apologize in advance…

There are many quiet little streams throughout.

We are trying to learn about New Zealand plants. We were told there are two native ferns, and you can tell the difference by looking at their trunks. The trunk of the black fern has a diamond pattern like this.

The other fern is the silver fern, with a trunk that looks like this. The underside of the leaves of the silver fern are … wait for it … silvery, and the Māori would cut the branches off and turn them upside down on paths to make them visible at night.

I love the way the branches of the trees here grow in angles that I just don’t expect. It gives the forest a magical feeling.

And of course, there are so many flowers. I’ll show you some of my favorites.

As we were walking through the trees we could hear the cicadas. At one point we discovered a tree where hundreds of the cicadas had molted, leaving their old exoskeleton on the tree branches.

Some of the pine trees have their cones lining the branches like this.

More flowers…

This next plant is a hanging plant from the Hoya family. It was in a pot in the greenhouse.

One of the greenhouses had a lily pond.

This next plant is interesting – it almost looks like someone painted a picture of a leaf on the leaf. But this is just the way the leaf looks.

More plants in the greenhouse.

We had a lovely lunch outside, and then headed to the rose garden.

Jan decided that she wanted to follow every path in the rose garden. After a while, we went and sat in the shade and watched her.

Our last stop was the Peace Garden. Jan and Duncan were reading the history, explaining that the eternal flame had been lit from the fires after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And here is the eternal flame.

As we were leaving the botanical garden we passed a magnolia tree with a single blossom.

We’ve been getting reports from home, and a winter storm just dumped 30 – 40 cm of snow on Ottawa, with another storm expected tomorrow. We were very happy wandering around the botanical garden.