Movie Night!

My true love and I went on a little adventure today, and there is footage!  We visited the Garden in the Woods, a lovely wildflower garden in Framingham, Massachusetts, run by the New England Wild Flower Society.

So many beautiful flowers!

So many turtles in the lily pond!  (Click to enlarge.)

Oh, but really, the flowers!

Oh, the flowers!

And there's shopping.  The New England Wild Flower Society propagates native plants.  The gift shop has all kinds of tempting tchotchkes -- wind chimes, jewelry, amazing books that are only tchotchkes when you have as many still unread books lying about the house as we do -- but also a beautiful selection of native plants nurtured by the Society which you can buy and plant in your own garden.  Most are quite reasonably priced, but there were some surprises.

These diminutive lady slippers (local native orchids), for example, cost $55.00 each, because having been cultivated from seed, not collected from the wild, each little plant took years to reach this size.  Once you plant them in your yard or habitat, they will flourish with little care (though they will not proliferate quickly), yet coaxing them this far into adulthood -- in captivity, as it were -- takes quite a bit of time and effort.

Okay, but I promised you movies.  They're short, and they were taken by my true love in order to show my spectacular prosthetist Bob how I am using my new leg out in the world.

The first shows me just walking down a gentle slope.

The second shows me walking down a very steep slope.  Bear in mind that the dirt is covered with gravel, some loose, some imbedded.

Garden in the Woods is not exactly accessible to wheelchair users unless you bring along Sven your muscular manservant to keep control of your chair on steep, gravel-dusted slopes like this.  (I did discover later that "cart tours," rides around the park in a covered golf-cart type of thing, are available for people with mobility issues; call in advance to arrange.)  However, I saw many other people walking around on alternative equipment or with various aids (including canes, crutches, and supportive arms of friends and family), and there were many, many strollers.

However you do it, this is a place you will want to go through slowly.  Otherwise you might miss something.

Comments

[Bipolarlawyercook]

Great photos, nice film at 11. : )
You know, I've never been to GITW.

[Jen of a2eatwrite]

It looks like it was a beautiful walk! I love trillium... I didn't realize they were native to MA.

[Sara]

BLC: You know, I could be persuaded to go back there at any time. Just sayin'. (And maybe next time I'll exhibit some intelligence by bringing a walking stick of some sort.)

Jen: I think trillium are native to North America generally, at least above a certain latitude. I could look it up, but I am too lazy.

Incidentally, we also have them in pink. :)

[laurie]

I love the musical background to the videos. Great choices, in both cases. And you, my dear, are grace in motion.

[The Goldfish]

This was very funny - my connection is a little slow and as the first video was loading I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny if it had her walking to Walk This Way," and then it did! It all looks absolutely gorgeous. It has been grey and raining all weekend and looks to continue here, so I am quite quite jealous.

[em]

Where do you live? Those flowers are so wonderful. I used to live in Minnesota and we could just tramp in the woods and see such fabulous flowers. Can you tell I miss it? Southern California is not so much with the wildflowers... okay, poppies and lupine which I love, but I miss the forest.

Oops. I didn't mean to go on and on.

It is great seeing your movies. I was upset by the thought of your thigh being shredded so I'm glad that the adjustments are working.

We read some of the same blogs! I adore Mole and I Blame The Patriarchy. I just started reading Panopticon. I really like his writing. But you don't have the Yarn Harlot! It seems like you would enjoy her writing.

Oops, digressing again. Anyway, it looks like you had a glorious weekend. Good!

[kathy a.]

what a lovely walk! if a little challenging. looks like the new leg is working well, though.

[laurie]

I was just thinking about how every time you refer to your "true love," I think of the Princess Bride. I am confident that you think this is a good thing (as do I). "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" ;-) Good night, Princess Buttercup.

[Sara]

Laurie: Yeah, watching me flap my arms with my butt sticking out, the word "grace" is just what I thought of, too. ;) hee hee Sincerely glad you enjoyed the show.

Goldfish: Ah, great (or diseased) minds think alike! When I worked at Whole Foods, if a customer needed to know where to find a product in the store, it was company policy to walk the customer over to the product. This was supposed to be good service, but also to amplify sales opportunities. Besides, we deliberately did not have numbers on the aisles so it was almost impossible to describe how to get to things any other way. Whenever I had to lead a customer away from my register for such a purpose, I would almost always say, "Walk this way." I was usually thinking not of this song (the work of Massachusetts talent, BTW) but of Igor in Young Frankenstein. Every once in awhile a customer would catch the reference and mimic me or do a true Igor walk or say "What hump?" or something equally silly, and those were the customers I loved the very best of all of them. :)

Em: OMG, THANK YOU. Because you mentioned the fact that you didn't see Yarn Harlot -- whom I dearly love, because she is so loving, because everything she does and everything she says is absolutely drenched with love and beauty that comes from love -- I discovered that she and a couple of other dearly loved bloggers at the end of the alphabet had fallen off my posted reading list in the left sidebar because I inadvertently had it set to only display 100 links. I have changed it to 500 links. So she's back where she belongs, thanks to you.

Nice fangs, BTW. :)

Kathy A.: Challenging? I sneer at challenging! I snap my fingers at challenging! I laugh in the face of challenging! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Okay, maybe not exactly, but it really doesn't factor in to my choices very often -- at least not outside the house. ;)

Actually, this isn't challenging. This is just me walking downhill. This is just how I do it. It's not actually harder, just a bit slower, and very much funnier to watch.

I think it would be challenging to impossible for someone with a painful joint condition, or someone alone in a wheelchair. But that's why they offer the golf carts tours. :)

Laurie again: Yes, there's a reason you think of that... It's one of my favorite books ever, ever, ever. I read it several times a year through high school and reread it every once in awhile still. I would read it at night, under the covers, with a flashlight, long after everyone else in the house was asleep yet I was far too tightly clutched at the heart by existential angst. It was very good medicine.