De Botanische Tuin (The Botanical Garden)

One of my favorite things about Afrikaanderplein, and something I only discovered last week, is that there is a botanical garden on the back side of the park

It is cool and shady (which I think substantially limits the kinds of plants they can grow there) because it is under a bunch of trees.  It is small but it is really precious and it is well designed.  They have loads of plants, in nicely arranged settings.
















There is even a little cabin for the tools and things.  You have to cross a little bridge to get to the garden, because it is on the other side of the canal.  There were only two other people when I went to look around.  Two men that I would guess were in their 70s who were in there watering and weeding.  One of them tried to talk to me but I couldn't remember any words about gardens and he didn't speak English so I just said " 't's mooie, heel mooie" ("It's beautiful, very beautiful") and smiled a lot and nodded, and he smiled and nodded and then we went our separate ways.




At first I was kind of disappointed.  The first section that you see is all lilies and things like that and, since it is well past their blooming times, it was just bunches of spiky leaves.  However, although they have a fairly small space, they make good use of it and, as I wended my way along the little bitty lanes between the plants, there was a lot of stuff to see.

These were the first blooming things I saw.  I don't know what they are, although they look kind of like bleeding hearts.  I just like the juxtaposition of the pink and the purple flowers.  And all of the green keeps it from looking too frilly.  Another thing that I like is that you can see, if you look really closely, that they have one, small, rhododendron bush further back in the bed.  It made things feel all homey (in a Southern kind of way).

They also had boxwood hedges in parts of the park, which made things smell all homey in a Grandma-and-Granddad's-house kind of way.

This tree is not very prepossessing (you can barely tell it is a tree, in fact) but I took a picture anyways because it sounds like it would be beautiful.


Its name "Sneeuwvlokkenboom" means Snow Flake Tree.





I found a picture of the tree in bloom on a Dutch gardening website and I think the name does it justice.













There were rows of different kinds of old roses as well but they had almost all bloomed and finished already.  However, I was intrigued because you could see all of the rose hips (and they were quite attractive, too).  I had always thought of rose hips as being red.  I did not know that they came in other colors as well.






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I do not know what these are (I couldn't find a label) but they looked vaugely like a rhubarb and they were almost as tall as me.

 They also had what I am pretty sure was actual rhubarb in the garden as well. 

This bush makes me remember all those fun days of making "ink", and writing secret messages, and staining our hands and clothes with purple juice, and trying really hard to decide if it was worth dying a painful death, and 'fessing up to Mom, if we tasted those berries and it turned out they were poisonous.


Apparently this is an American variety.

This tree I thought was very pretty but I had never heard of it before.  I looked it up when I got home.  Apparently it is a highly toxic tropical plant from which we get castor oil.  I think I liked it better before I knew that.

The garden was a lot of fun and very peaceful and idyllic.  I think I will probably wander back through there again later.  Maybe after having learned some Dutch gardening vocabulary.