Trip to the Botanical Gardens

On our last full day in Wales we took a trip to the Botanical Gardens. As you may have noticed from my photography on my blog, I quite like wandering around places where plants grow and taking lots and lots and lots of photos.

Well, I took a lot of photos while we were there and the ones I'm sharing here aren't even a tiny fraction of what I snapped. To be fair, there were quite a few of my gloves but even discounting those, there's still somewhere in the region of two hundred photos of plants and trees and green leafy things.

When we got in it did remind me a little bit of Mount Stuart. We ventured into the Walled Garden and you could see all the beds laid out, though owing to the time of year there weren't any flowers there. I want to go back next time I'm in Wales to take a look at it during a different season (hopefully summer).

There was a long, humid greenhouse that we walked through as well. It was a lot like the greenhouse we have on the estate. Lots of tropical plants and it kind of felt like something out of Harry Potter with all these giant leaves and dangly bits hanging across the path. I didn't take any photos in there because I was worried about my camera getting all steamed up, so I made up for it when we were outside.

One of my favourite things about the Botanical Gardens was the massive biodome greenhouse that they have there. It's a lot like the one at the Eden Project and features plants from all over the world. We had a picnic lunch in there and then wandered around the Mediterranean, Australia and South American bits of the greenhouse.

And I got to play with a bunch of the features on my camera. I miniaturised the plants and people in the building, I made the sunlight through the window look all sparkly, I played with the fisheye function. And I took a panoramic shot of the place from one of the bridges:

Once we'd wandered all around the big greenhouse we ventured back outside where it was ridiculously chilly. That led to a lot of photos of my gloves as I struggled to handle the camera with my frozen fingers.

There were lots of arty looking statues all over the place. I took photos of pretty much all of them, even the ones that I didn't know exactly what they were supposed to be.

There was also an old pharmacist's shop there where you could learn about all the plants which have helped influence medicines and have healing properties. They had a display at the back of the room where a local sewing group had embroidered flowers and plants which had been used in treatments and for medicinal purposes. They were really clever and some were so intricate.

It was a great day out and I really hope to visit again in the future. Perhaps by the time I go back I'll have finished sorting through all the pictures I took this time!