Jun 4 2009

Morris Arboretum – May 28, 2009

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Each week the Longwood interns and PG students have the opportunity to go on a field trip of sorts. Even though this past week was orientation for us new interns, we still were able to go on the trip. It was to the Morris Arboretum, which is very near Philedelphia.

Here is the website for the Morris Arboretum

We were given an introductory tour from a volunteer guide at the garden when we first got there. She ended the tour at the newest addition to the garden, the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is a sculptural piece that is made entirely of woven sticks and limbs.

After the initial tour, we all were let to roam the garden as we chose. We actually were able to meet up with the Morris Arboretum interns for a minute as well, which was neat. They had a small collection of different roses picked that were all different fragrances. Most of them I couldn’t handle, but I’ve never done well with the strong fragrances of roses. One smelled like raspberries though and I really liked that one.

Mark Richardson and I then sort of broke off from the group because I was meant to meet with Mark Glicksman, who is the creator of the BG-Base program that Longwood has been facilitating. The project I’ll be working on during my time here rely’s heavily on the BG-Base and BG-Map programs that Mark developed. So I was able to meet with him and left with a much better understanding of what was going to be implemented for the Longwood database and mapped collections.

After that I sort of took off on my own to check out some of the trees around the garden. The overall layout of the garden was probably what I liked the best. Its sort of like a bowl with a lot of different elevation changes and areas with lots of tree cover. There are also some very impressive tree specimens there.

Sweet Katsura Tree. Its huge!

It was a pretty muggy afternoon and I felt a bit over dressed for the weather, so even though I was enjoying myself there, the air conditioned bus was a bit of a welcomed relief.

I took lots of photos while there, but here are a few of different parts of the garden, as labeled.