BROOKLYN BOTANICAL GARDEN

"I went with my son and my friend to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. I went to have a perfect day. My restless mind has as much a need to migrate as a Tern, and at certain times of the year at all costs it will. The botanics, inches from Brooklyn’s noise and soot, are sweetness and instant verdant energy, a testament to a vacation in one’s own back yard. The mind doesn't necessarily need distance. It needs transition. Take the same people who are clamoring for a seat on the Q train and transpose them to a lush bucolic patch of non-urban city and they bloom like the Magnolia trees."

-Micaela Walker

Micaela Walker is a mom, photographer, and erstwhile photo editor born and bred in NYC and living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She is married to a Scottish carpenter named Sam. Her work can be seen on MICAELA WALKER PHOTO & ROAN AND LULA BLOG.

2012

BOTANICAL GARDENS TO VISIT IN SPRING:

Atlanta Botanical Gardens
Wander through the gardens’ 300 foot Canopy walkway and take in hundreds of thousands of Georgia daffodils and tulips as they bloom for spring.

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden
Picnic on the rocks and enjoy a glass of Stellenbosch Chenin blanc before climbing the slope of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, where you can taking in Mandela’s Gold and Crane Flowers, all part of South Africa’s first botanical garden.

Claude Monet Foundation at Giverny
Walk into Monet’s water lilies and become immersed in the wisteria-draped bridge. This is where the artist lived and worked.

Jardin Botanique de Montreal
Read by The Dream Lake Garden and sit amongst thousands of monarch butterflies.

Reid’s Palace
The Garden of the Atlantic is filled with hibiscus, semitropical fauna, and mimosas. George Bernard Shaw learned to tango here (and you can too – there are tango lessons at the cocktail bar every Saturday evening).

Tohono Chul Park
Desert ironwood trees, adobe houses, medicinal plants and southwestern fare on the shady Tea Room patio.

Singapore Botanic Gardens
Go to see the national orchid garden—it contains more than 1,000 orchid species and 2,000 hybrids.

Andromeda Botanical Gardens
A six-acre enclave of tropical plants, cacti and fragrant ginger. A massive fig tree on the property reportedly inspired the Portuguese to name the island (“The Bearded One”).

~Ashley Simpson

April 2013