13 Aug 2016
Gorgeous Gardens

We drove up the western coast of Nova Scotia to New Minas, taking in water Three long narrow beds stretch from left to right across the picture, their red, yellow, purple, white, and orange blooms creating a lovely splash of color Beds of bright blooms views.

In Annapolis Royal we stopped to see the Historic Garden and took a bunch of pictures, which wasn't hard because the garden was so darn beautiful. We had arrived late in the day, but the gardens, though large, are well laid out for study, for spending time admiring the flowers, and, for folks like us, to take a brisk walk and have a sample of their variety.

There are more than a dozen different gardens, each with a different The garden path surrounds an oval of green grass, inside of which are three different floral displays, using contrasting colors to create a painter's pallette Victorian garden theme. Our favorite was the Victorian Garden because it was just bursting with colors, but there were others with their own charms: plants with similarly colored blooms, varieties of greens or blues, and so on, a garden of edible plants, other groupings along a gentle path. We spent about an hour (thank you, AAA book, for telling us to spend at least half an hour, which persuaded us we could make a short stop on our way). A closeup picture with a large violet-black leaf in the foreground, with folds of texture interspersed with drops and puddles of rain on the leaf Raindrops

There was rain earlier in the morning as we drove up the coast, and the fresh drops of rain on the garden plants made them even more beautiful.

Heather, for us, has always been a word we read in books, eliciting images of soft English countrysides. Here in Annapolis Royal, a very swank town, we saw A bed with about a dozen kins of heather next to the walking path, each with a different gentle color of violet or green or white or yellow Heather display an entire bed of different kinds of heather. It was just as we had imagined it, with soft, gentle shades of color.

This part of Nova Scotia is much more heavily populated than the areas we have come from, with one town after another along the old trunk road. We took Route 1 which is roughly parallel to the more heavily traveled Route 101, and which winds up and down and back and forth near the water. Beautiful and interesting. The southern part was through yet another concentration of Acadian communities.