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Retrieving the husband, and what he thought were extinct trees.

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I kept strolling the gardens of Blithewold by myself…

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Giving my husband time to exhaust the unsuspecting strangers who’d begun chatting with him.

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I strolled.

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And strolled.

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And was tempted to check out the bamboo forest…

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But turned around and realized he would go on all day without an intervention.

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Working my way around the greenhouse…

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I flanked the group, whose women were looking around, shuffling their feet and trying to politely escape.

As I joined them, the man was telling my husband about the line of trees that was pruned like shrubs in the background of this picture.

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He said the tree was native to the Chinese mountains and had been extinct for a thousand years until a horticulturist retrieved some seeds from a fossilized specimen and brought it back to life. The man told us he had just collected some of its cones and intended to plant them on his property, suggesting we do the same.

Which my husband did.

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Steering my spouse away, we continued exploring.

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Blithewold is known for its fabulous old growth trees.

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And some of them are hella impressive.

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Sequoiadendron giganteum,

The Giant Sequoia.

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This is the tallest one on the east coast.

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But I loved these big beauties.

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Weeping European beech.

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Even the roots were awesome.

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And this next tree?

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A Dawn Redwood.

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Whose surrounding ground was littered with little cones just like the ones my husband collected.

Thousand year old extinct tree my ass.

😒

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Turns out this was the rare specimen.

A Franklin tree.

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Extinct in the wild but cultivated and grown by gardeners.

Next up…

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The house.

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18 thoughts on “Retrieving the husband, and what he thought were extinct trees.”

  5. Beautiful trees. Was hugging them allowed? Your hubby sounds like a friend of ours – Paul. And we often go away together as part of a group. ‘Where’s Paul?’ Is commonly asked. ‘Oh he found some people who needed talking to.’

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  9. I had thought Giant Sequoias only grew on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada until I saw one in France. They are truly impressive. I drove my kids into a Sequoia grove in CA and neither would take their nose out of a book (one claiming that looking out the window made them carsick). I stopped and we got out and walked up to a tree. Extending our arms, we stood side-by-side, one person at a time moving to the end of the line to measure how many of us it took to reach around the tree. That got their noses out of books for a while. And it was something like 40 arm spans.

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