Midweek meet up with flowers

Quilters can meet up without involving fabric.  Barbara (blogging at Stash Overflow) and I did just that on Wednesday.  She came to Illinois to visit her mother downstate and her brother in Chicago.  We met at Chicago Botanic Garden .   She had her brother's membership card and I had a one-day pass from the library so we were not confined to the timed-entry imposed due to the pandemic.  CBG has always been a popular place to visit and attendance has soared this past year.

In the English walled garden

We began with the tram ride, a 2-1/2-mile guided tour around the perimeter of the garden that took us past the behind-the-scenes greenhouses and plant laboratories and through patches of prairie restoration. (That section looked a lot like the forest preserves I've been visiting all along).   

After lunch in the cafeteria -- order inside,
pick up outside -- we visited some of the cultivated gardens. (Cultivated, and how!  There are 200 staff and hundreds more volunteers who tend the gardens.)  

The waterfall is a 45-foot drop.  Just standing beside it was cool and refreshing on a humid day. 

I don't have i.d. for all the flowers.  :) 

But of course these are roses.  

Carolus Linnaeus.

Robert Berks, American (b. 1922)  / Bronze, 1982 / This figure of Swedish physician Linnaeus (1707-1778) looms large in the history of science and is appropriately placed in the Heritage Garden. Linnaeus established binomial nomenclature, the international system of naming plants and animals that is still in use today.  He is shown reaching eagerly toward the plants in his path with a collector’s enthusiasm. The prominent bird in the sculpture — a golden plover, which can fly for thousands of miles — refers to the many students of Linnaeus who traveled the globe collecting plants for him to name

What a lovely day!