Wisley Gardens/ Rousseau Art

The Boy Child and I went to RHS Wisley Gardens this week for a homeschool outing.  

We joined the Gardens tour for the first hour and took some lovely pictures and learned some history of the gardens.  

This picture (above) is, we were told, the most photographed of the gardens.

It is a picture the the Laboratory building, and the canal.

The first glass house that the gardens had is now the canal.

We are standing in the potters shed at the end of the canal taking the picture.

Three pictures of the beautiful Autumn colors.

This Chinese style Pavilion was the winning feature at a garden show and was moved into the gardens in one whole piece.  The three tall trees behind the pavilion are Metasequoia.  These trees were thought to be extinct until a small stand of them was discovered in China in 1944.  These three trees are grown from seeds of that stand, after WWII.  In the foreground of the second and third pictures is Gunner, a wild rhubarb.  The leaves have been pruned and placed around the base of the plants to protect them from the winter frosts and snow.  (If you look back at the RHS Wisley Gardens post the fifth picture down with the Boy Child behind a huge leaf is live Gunner).

This tree is a Liquid Amber Maple and was the Boy Child's favorite plant for this visit.

At the Chinese Pavilion, just turn around and there it is in it's stunning fall glory.

Here is a stunning area of Bamboo in different varieties. It was planted after a horrendous storm in the 1980's blew many of the trees in this area down.  The quick growing bamboo was planted to create a canopy to shade the plant growing lower that depended on the shaded environment the trees had provided.

A panorama view from the top of the hillside rock gardens.

Cat snoozing in the Alpine Garden display.

Alpine Crevice Garden.  This display made me a bit homesick.

 

From here we found a place out of the nippy breeze to eat lunch.

We then sat through a short lecture on Henri Rousseau.  The children looked at some of his paintings.  The focus was one a piece titled Surpris!  They discussed it, taliking about layering and clues to what the picture was about, and how each individual may have his/her own opinion.

We then walked over to the Glass House where we walked about the Tropical areas and sketched leaves and plants and flowers for a collage we would come back and make.

A few pictures inside the Tropical Glass House.

There was a display of welded metal creatures throughout the exhibit.

And here is the final result of our wanderings and sketches.

Beautiful for the scant 20 minutes he had to create this master piece.  He had so many more ideas to incorporate.