We were provided with free admission to visit the Cleveland Botanical Garden.
A great quote from the Cleveland Botanical Garden website.
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love,
We will love only what we understand,
We will understand only what we are taught.”Baba Dioum, Senegalese ecologist
While touring Cleveland we made out next stop at the Cleveland Botanical Garden at University Circle. We did visit during winter and it was freezing, but that did not stop us. While the Garden has a wide range of outside gardens to experience, it also has a giant climate controlled glasshouse. And all throughout the year and even during winter, the huge glasshouse offers 2 different climates which include the spiny desert of Madagascar and the rainforest of Costa Rica. Each environment includes a diverse array of animals, insects and other life.
While visiting, the current exhibit and still on exhibit is Orchid Mania, going on from February 11th to March 25th 2012. Click here for a list of upcoming exhibits. The entire building is filled with orchids of all types and includes hundreds of bright, colorful, and fragrant orchids, many of them blooming. The orchids are also on display throughout the Garden’s Costa Rica Glasshouse.
The Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse recreates two of the world’s most exotic ecosystems. The desert of Madagascar has a range of vegetation, animals, spiny plants and flowers. It is dry and warm. The misty rainforest of Costa Rica is humid and warm and supports a wide range of flowers, trees, plants, animals and butterflies.
Here are pictures from our walk through of the beautiful flowers in the glasshouse and of some of the life and vegetation in the glasshouse.
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If you do have the chance to visit during the warmer times of the year, the outside gardens vary and with each offering something different than each other. The different gardens include the Campsey-Stauffer Gateway Garden, C.K. Patrick Perennial Border, Elizabeth and Nona Evans Restorative Garden, Hershey Children’s Garden, Japanese Garden, Katherine Philipp Geis Terrace, Mary Ann Sears Swetland Rose Garden, Paula and David Swetland Topiary Garden, and the Western Reserve Herb Society Herb Garden. Click on the garden names and links to see more about what they each have to offer. Also select areas allow one to eat a meal while being stunned and amazed by the beauty the gardens have to offer.
If in Cleveland for a visit or if you live there, check out the Cleveland Botanical Garden and appreciate the value and beauty of nature and what the Gardens have to offer.
