Another American Adventure: Phipps Conservatory

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Phipps Conservatory - Pittsburgh

This afternoon we went into Pittsburgh to the Phipps Conservatory - a botanical garden and greenhouse. It felt and looked a lot like our backyard in Florida! Many of the plants that were celebrated were things that we had considered nuisances.

Lovely lavender all around.

A lot of glass art interspersed with the foliage.

A beautiful collection of orchids ...

A butterfly room ...

Did you know that butterflies drink with their feet?

This bloom was really strange. Like Christmas tree lights?

I need a cheat sheet like this for identifying all the wildflowers I see!

A Japanese garden ...

Lots of large bonsai ...

And some strange scapes ...

This one looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

Even a desert room.

2 comments:

BarbaraAugust 7, 2011 at 4:34 PM
Looks like an excellent botanical garden. Reminds of Montreal's which I haven't visited in years! The one in Pittsburgh looks more modern, though.
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beth cioffolettiAugust 7, 2011 at 4:49 PM
It was a little overwhelming, there was so much to see and consider. I need to go back to these kind of places more than once. I noticed people with books and earphones, sitting down and taking it one room (or one plant) at a time. Often I feel like I'm just skimming the surface of life, there is so much complexity and multiplicity.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.