Much as I love museums, eventually I become “museumed out”. After several days of art, history, and enough cultural enrichment to last a month, I decided to spend today at the Berlin Botanical Garden. The weather wholeheartedly approved of my plan: warm temperatures, a cloudless blue sky, and just enough breeze to make being outdoors delightful.
I did have a minor navigational mishap getting there. Asher was in school and both Matt and Leonie had other commitments, so I was on my own. Confident that this would be an easy outing, I ordered an Uber to what I thought was the garden’s main entrance. Instead, I arrived at a train station with the same name. Since the garden’s entrance was a much longer walk than I cared to undertake, I summoned a second Uber. My budget suffered, but my sense of independent exploration remains blissfully overconfident.
A couple of things struck me during my garden visit. I entered through the North American section and was surprised to find beds of begonias, pansies, and geraniums displayed with great care and attention. Back home, these are the flowers that show up in supermarket garden centers and window boxes. Here they were botanical celebrities. Then again, I wasn’t home.
The second surprise was realizing just how far behind Berlin’s spring is compared with New York’s. I should have expected that, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to me. Berlin is nearly 12 degrees of latitude farther north than New York City, so spring lags behind us by several weeks. Trees and flowers that had finished blooming weeks ago at home were only now reaching their peak.
I haven’t mentioned this before, but I pulled a hamstring a few weeks ago. It has made sitting on hard surfaces painful. Throughout the day I developed a routine: walk, admire flowers, sit down to rest, leap up like a Jack-in-the-Box when my thigh objected, then walk some more. By midafternoon I must have looked like I was participating in a highly specialized exercise program for seniors.
One other thing caught my attention. The Berlin Botanical Garden is sign crazy. In many American gardens, I find myself searching around an interesting plant and wondering what it is because there is no label to be found. Here, the opposite problem prevails. Every plant seems to have its own little white identification sign. As a gardener and plant lover, I appreciate the effort, but after a while the signs became visual clutter. If you’re wondering why they don’t appear in my photos, thank AI. I cheerfully erased a small forest of plant labels before sharing the pictures.
Fortunately, I love gardens. The grounds and greenhouses are vast, beautifully maintained, and filled with plants from around the world. There are quiet paths, shady corners, and enough variety to keep even a slightly gimpy visitor happily wandering for hours.
By the end of the day, my hamstring and I had reached a truce. Pain be damned, the garden was too beautiful to cut short my visit.