8/14 - Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

The weather was cloudy but good enough for us to spend the day outside at the University of Minnesota's Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, 30 miles west of Apple Valley. It's a spectacular place.....definitely one of the best we've visited. It's 59 years old and 1,137 acres in size, much older and larger than the NC Arboretum which is only 31 years old and 434 acres. 


Naturally, all the pictures for today are of gardens and plants. 

Visitors Center

I was so intent on the plants I forgot to take any pictures of the front of the visitor center, so here's one from their website. All the same plants are blooming right now, but today's sky wasn't blue.

Front bed of annuals

A magnificent hydrangea with perennials

 Artwork to sit in - listen to the wind's sound through the wooden slats

 Ornamental grasses section

The ornamental grasses section was one of our favorites. When trying to choose grasses to plant it's important to see their mature size and shape, so visiting this garden was very useful for our garden at home. The NC Arboretum has a nice section of grasses but it doesn't have nearly as many varieties.

 Japanese garden

The Japanese garden was quite small and had very few flowers. It also had no Japanese maples which was a surprise. We've seen them in other places around the area so they do grow in this climate.

 Hosta gardens with sculpture

They have a huge selection of hostas, in both sunny and shady sites. Many of them had ragged leaves which, from our previous experience, we believe came from hail storms. 

 Annual gardens

Unusual kaleidoscope 

There were several "flower kaleidoscopes".  The containers of flowers turned under the kaleidoscopes rather than having the kaleidoscopes move. The brass tubes in the picture are the kaleidoscopes and the blue basins turned under them.

There's a three-mile driving route which leads to the larger areas like shade trees, nut trees, conifers, ashes, wildflower gardens, etc.  They also have a tram which takes people around the route so no one has to walk it if they don't want to or don't have time. We chose to drive ourselves instead. It wasn't at all crowded so there was no problem with traffic on the narrow one-way road.

This has brought to an end our wonderful four weeks in Minnesota. After reading the weather displays in the history center a few days ago, we've learned how lucky we've been to have such pleasant temperatures. Of course we knew about Minnesota's brutal winters (which we will avoid at all costs), but we didn't know that normal summer weather can be very hot and humid, something we've had for very few days. We also knew about the biting insects (mosquitoes, black flies and other irritating critters) but we've been extremely lucky not to have been subjected to them either. We ran into a few mosquitoes at Camp Ripley, probably because the campground was right on the river and there were still backwaters which were good for larvae. We have been supremely lucky all around.

Tomorrow we're heading due east 350 miles across Wisconsin to the Door Peninsula which extends into Lake Michigan from Green Bay north.