This is my second post featuring some of the shots I took on Mother’s Day at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. For this post, I decided to focus on the varied shades and shapes of green.

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There is a bit of magic to the first sightings of green in spring. The first hints of life after a long cold and snowy winter make us pause with wonder and delight at the newness of color in the landscape. While the snows had melted long before we went to the gardens in May, it was our first all day outing that didn’t have us wearing boots and sweaters.  It was glorious to feel the sun warm us and smell the richness of the earth as we walked on and off the paths of the garden’s many acres. I found my thoughts wander to the fantastical worlds and words of Lewis Carroll.  I could imagine Alice and the White Rabbit coming around the bend asking us to join them and the Mad Hatter for tea in the garden.   Since there were few people at the gardens, we would often be alone, so I wasn’t self-conscious of how often I stopped to photograph the flora and fauna of the Berkshires.  I think this intimate family time added to my whimsy as well as the headiness I felt by finally seeing the world in shades of green instead of cold bright white blankets of snow and ice.

The greens were strong and solid as well as soft and sheer.  The ferns were particularly delicate from their unfolding fronds to the fan like display of their feathery leaves.  The greens were also more solid and shiny as the lime green spot of the frog we saw just under the water by the pond’s edge.  His stillness added a hint of brightness to the brown murky water. Then there was the contrasts of greens and whites and greens and yellos as flowers met stem.  The perfect starch white of the snowdrop flowers (galanthus nivalis) punctuated by tiny green dots immediately brought a scene from the movie Fantasia to mind when the fairies come to light up the flowers so they can dance. I wonder what these gardens would look like at night with the flowers gently detaching themselves from their stems and floating down to dance to Tchaikovsky’s Valse Des Fleurs.

When I would look up from the flowers to see where my husband and son had gone, I could see my husband sitting with his head turned up to the sky trying to drink in the sun.  Our son could be found either cautiously peering under leaves and rocks for garden snakes and rollie pollies or running through the fields and woods with a stick in hand.  My son’s obsession with sticks and branches that he brandished sword-like at the air and beheading dandelions of course brought Lewis Carroll to mind again.

The only thing I can say about our day out in the sunny green world was that it twas brillig!

The fiddleheads are opening.

I want to come back in a month to see how lush the fronds of these ferns have become.

The shades of greens added depth to the browns of the murky water as we walked around the pond.

Then there was a glorious hint of lime green hidden in the reeds.

This little frog sat silently as I took picture after picture of him.

He looks a little battle worn with a red mark behind his right eye.

The beginnings.

Up close unfolding.

I love the curves as they unfold

Fanning out.

There is something so delicate about ferns.

Yet there is also a strength to them like this one growing out of the bark of a fallen tree.

Then there were this beautiful bits of ivy and fern in the flower box outside the tool shed.

The greens and whites were so beautiful after such a snowy monotone winter.

I loved the perfect little green dots on what I am calling fairy skirts event though their real common name is snowdrop (galanthus nivalis).

One single yellow flower in the sea of rippling green leaves.

I love how it is hard to tell where the green ends and the yellow begins.

Boys love their bugs.

His vorpal sword in hand.

Full out fan.

Single curled frond.

All photos © 2015 Lisa D’Adamo-Weinstein – lisadw.wordpress.com