Yesterday Mer and I headed toward Birmingham, to go to Mountain Brook, a cute suburb of the city, and home to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Back in October, I signed us up to become members of the Holden Arboretum, and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens was on the list of gardens that honored the Holden membership. I was feeling pretty smug about cashing in on our benefits until we got to the Gardens and saw that admission was always free for everyone. So much for being smug.

The Birmingham Botanical Gardens is fairly small at about sixty-five acres, but it is very well laid out. They have about twenty-five separate gardens in the space, from vegetable gardens to local forest trees and plants to a formal rose garden for a fern garden (I am strangely fond of ferns). And, of course, they have the required-by-botanical-guild-law Japanese garden, which was very pretty and was the biggest garden on the grounds.

Mer and I like botanical gardens because they always make pleasant places to walk. We were able to see the entire gardens in about five hours, and that included an excellent sit-down lunch at the cafe. As an aside, our service was excellent; Mer posited that good waitresses become great when they have southern accents – at any rate, our waitress was friendly and attentive.

What surprised me the most about the gardens was how few flowers were in bloom. About ninety percent of the roses were not yet in bloom, and that was true for much of the gardens. The flowering shrubs and tress were in bloom, and the pansies were out in great numbers, but one of the gardeners told us we were about a month early. I knew it was still pretty early in the spring by the calendar, but I had wrongfully assumed that the flowers would be way ahead of summer this far south. However, even with limited blooms, the gardens were still immaculately groomed, featured fountains and sculptures, and lots of pleasant walking paths. For whatever reason, many of the artificial creeks and ponds were dry, but it is still a very well-done garden, especially for free.

After the garden adventure, we drove the short distance to Samford University, a Christian college in Birmingham. Mer has had several students go there, and she likes to have a visual of what different colleges look like. So, we drove through the campus, which is surprisingly large. The campus is beautiful, with all of the buildings made of red brick and in a classic style. There are lots of open spaces, and the university sits on a heavily wooded hill. The main chapel is huge and crowned with a classical-style dome that overlooks all of the sports fields. It is a lovely campus, and I was glad Mer wanted to see it. It would have been nice to get out and walk around, but it was raining, and we wanted to be back home by 5:00, so we settled for the driving tour of campus.

We did get home at around 5:00 and played with the kids, especially our niece, who found it fun to hide coins around the house and make us look for them. We had a meal of good leftovers that we all ate together around an actual table. We then played with the kids some more, and read to them as they went to bed. I read a Spider-Man book to our nephew and Mer read a book to our niece.

After reading time, Mer and I took an after-dark walk to the strip, the nearby street right next to the university. The street was not empty, but was not hopping yet – I guess it was just a bit early. We walked onto the actual campus and saw one side of the stadium, some nice brick houses that are fraternities, and the education building and library. We finished our walk at the big quad on campus, and we walked over to the main library and then back to the carillon. The university is huge; we only saw a small fraction of it.

We finished the evening off by stopping at Cold Stone. We got our ice cream and ate outside. The street was much busier now, and so we ate and people-watched. We discovered a fashion trend that may or may not make it to Ohio – the girls, by and large, were wearing very short athletic shorts and really large and baggy shirts. Once we finished our ice cream, we walked back home, where everyone was in bed. I headed to bed myself, but Mer stayed up for a couple more hours to grade homework.