Winterthur Gardens

In mid-May Mum and one of her oldest friends, Auntie Rita, came to spend a long weekend in Philadelphia.  Auntie Rita is a big gardener, so I arranged a Saturday garden excursion to Winterthur and Longwood.  Nothing like Delaware for fabulous old du Pont estates.

We did the introductory house tour, which had changed very much since the first time I took it, like ten years ago or something?  Or maybe all the academic excursions into the collections have bamboozled me, so that I no longer remember what the basic tour consists of.  It's hard to take the regular tour, knowing that all sorts of weird and cool stuff is so close by, but you can't leave your tour.  Like the fraktur room, and the room with flocked wallpaper, and all the spatterware, and the weird low-ceiling little Pilgrim-era rooms, and the Shaker stuff up in the top of the house...

But we spent most of our Winterthur time in the gardens, which were lovely.  Auntie Rita (in blue) and Mum (in pink).  Though this photo is from Longwood: the photo I have of them together at Winterthur, they look crazy, so I'm not posting it.

 Looking down toward the reflecting pool.

Mum at the reflecting pool.

I think he's squeezing a frog or a fish.

A real frog!  I'd forgotten that they like to live in the reflecting pool: when I was an undergrad and working in the paintings lab, we had named all the frogs and the koi in the nearby koi ponds.

When I was at Winterthur this past January, this little fellow was wearing a tartan scarf.

I didn't know what any of the flowers were, but that was fine, because Auntie Rita knew!

This was some sort of faux-dogwood?  I think?  It was really lovely, whatever it was.

Quarry garden.

Little Mum up on the bridge while Auntie Rita and I check out the flowers down below.

The Enchanted Forest.  Really, if I was little, you would have had to extract me with heavy machinery from this place.

I would have attempted to live, full-time, in this little thatched cabin.  

So, a lovely morning at Winterthur, and lunch at the Winterthur Visitor's Center.  I keep wanting to type "W" for Winterthur: it was the shorthand that we used during grad school.  The whole name is just sooo long.