Our touring schedule sometimes requires perseverance. Today, in order to be in a lovely place, we pushed through:
– Temperatures in the mid-thirties with twenty-something-mph winds (two days after temperatures were in the seventies)
– Counting on the on-site café to be open for breakfast and being disappointed
– Walking a half-marathon (13.1 miles) worth of distance over the course of the day
I know these “hardships” are not much in a pandemic age, but they sure wore me out today. The wind and cold almost made us give up in the first hour, but we stuck it out, and the temperatures, while never warm, did get up to comfortable by noon.

Anyway, we made our way to Norfolk, which is a navy town of 240,000, to go to the Norfolk Botanical Garden. Yes, we had already been to Richmond’s earlier in the week, but our visit was free (for our being members of Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens), we like walking in botanical gardens, and there are some special features of Norfolk’s gardens. They are surrounded by water on three sides (the water of a lake, not the ocean); at 175 acres, it is the largest botanical garden in Virginia; and it abuts an airport. Really, really abuts it – the garden started out as a WPA project at the same time the airport was built in the 1930s. You can walk to and from the airport easily from the gardens, and there is a viewpoint looking right at the airport, with the airport fence only ten or twenty yards away. One of my favorite spots on the grounds is a bench overlooking a quiet inlet of the lake, over which jets were taking off right overhead (just a few per hour, so not too disturbing, but very cool). Anyway, you can actually drive in, fly in, or boat in to the gardens, which is pretty great. There are actually two interconnected canals for boats to float up to the visitor’s center.

So, yes, another botanical garden, but one with a cold start that almost made us change plans. I’m glad we didn’t. There are twenty-six display gardens and two large “exploration gardens” that are essentially woods with good paths and lots of azaleas planted around. I enjoyed all of the spaces, but several stood out to me:

– The Perennial Garden, where hundreds of daffodils and tulips were planted around a fountain, in a symmetrical way, in a place that was adjacent to one of the canals.

– The Renaissance Court, which is a series of terraced lawns facing a huge fountain, which in turn looks onto another great space, which is…

– The Moses Ezekiel Statuary Vista, where the garden has displayed eleven sculptures of famous artists through the ages, with all the statues being created by Moses Ezekiel, who was born in Virginia during the 1800s.

– The Flowering Arboretum, a huge space full of flowering trees, which are planted such that some of the trees are always in bloom. Today it seemed as if every third tree was in full flower. This was probably my favorite place in the botanical gardens.

We saw all the individual spaces, and then caught the last tram going around the park. It was good to sit for awhile, and the tram gave us a good overview of what we had seen during the day, with the driver providing some light commentary along the way. Satisfied that we had done everything to do at the gardens, we quit a little early – at 4:45. Hey, we aren’t young anymore.