~ Norfolk Botanical Gardens (August 2001) ~

Norfolk, Virginian~ before driving home from Virginia Beach the day after my birthday, we stopped and spent the morning at the Norfolk Botanical gardens, which is surrounded on 3 sides by a lake, and bordered on the 4th by the Norfolk Airport. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and we had a good time wandering about. The gardens have a canal system with little tour boats to take you around and a regular tram tour as well. Their claim to fame is a really large rose garden, something like 3,000 different plants. Of course there were a lot of other themed gardens, Japanese, Butterfly, Perennial, etc, as well as lots of little ponds. While we were there, they had on temporary loan these really, really large presidential busts. Not very attractive presidential busts, I might add, but pretty impressive just in terms of size. And you can't help wondering what they look like rolling along the highway when they're being transported to the next place they're on loan to!