I have always been one for the outdoors. I’ve spent many an afternoon wading up streams and many an evening driving around potter county looking for deer. The majority of my experiences outdoors, and many of my fondest childhood memories take place at my grandparent’s cabin; from fishing and catching frogs to watching bears and flocks of turkey waltz up the valley. It has always been my escape and my sanctuary, and it is a place that invigorates me in a way that few other places can. The colors in fall are some of the most spectacular I have ever seen, and the sky, the darkest east of the Mississippi, is the ceiling for the absolute and perfect silence from everything this world knows. It teaches you so much and yet asks for nothing, and nothing we can ever hope to create will match the beauty of a single dewed flower.

This past summer I had the opportunity to visit the UK, and went to a number of walled gardens that were truly spectacular. They were put together with such taste and were like nothing I had ever seen before. To pair that with the history of the estates made for a truly amazing experience that left me with very unfair expectations for gardens such as the arboretum. However, I did enjoy my walk around the grounds, and would definitely like to see what they are able to do with it in the future. This was my first visit, and while it was not quite what I expected, it was still nice. I found it very interesting to see the difference in variety between here and in England. In England, there are an unbelievable variety of flowers and other various exotic plants, likely brought to the British Isles during their period of colonialism. It is also understandable why many of these plants aren’t available to us, since we have tried much harder to keep out living organisms that are not indigenous to our regional biospheres. That being said, there were a couple of plants that I was not familiar with, and really liked the lily pads; as they were the largest I had ever seen in person. I was also encouraged by the number of projects that they seem to be undertaking for the expansion of the center in the future. I will definitely come back sometime next spring or summer so I can try and see what it looks like in its entirety, as this probably wasn’t the peak season for colour. On a tangent, there are a lot of trees on campus that I am not familiar with, and I only live an hour east of here. The one thing I was most surprised by since I came last month was the difference in plant life. I hadn’t really considered that it might be different, but this is a much flatter area than I come from so I guess it may make sense. Anyway, I think it would be a great campus project to put placards on the trees, and maybe certain other plants on campus to identify them. This is common practice at zoos and I believe that a number of other Universities have them as well. Just to put that thought out there.