The misty white center portion of this photo, what I thought was a light leak, turns out to be dust on my lens. The lens cover on my Nikon P7000 is acting up again. Here it looks like an apparition as volunteers who help the county maintain the park hosted another of their weekly arboretum tours. The last tour of the year is next Sunday at 2pm and starts in the parking lot of the old zoo.
The shot above is from weeks ago. Yesterday’s crowd was so large they had to split it into two large crowds. Sun will do that. We went with the one that did the tour in reverse. The tour is interesting enough to do more than once. We found cherry blossoms in full Fall bloom, the once “extinct” Dawn redwoods, blue Juniper berries that smelled like gin. We learned how to tell fir trees from spruce. The cones on a fir tree point up and the ones on a spruce point down. Our guide pointed out that “fir” has less letters than “spruce” like “up” is to “down”. I remember “forks on the left” with a similar trick.
When the tour was over one of the guides urged us to vote Democratic in the next election because the “Republicans could care less about the environment.” He said they rejected spending 15,000 (that would been matched by the state) on the parks in the the last year alone.
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Port is left, both have four letters, starboard and right have more.
My sister-in-law Jane’s father Ed is prominent horticulturist and Emeritus Professor at UW Madison. Each spring he visits here and takes us on a tour of Highland arboretum. He knows it intimately even though he is from Wisconsin; it is that well known. And, coincidentally, Rich and Jane live next to Highland Park.