La Dame Aux Camellias

I heart the Planting Fields Arboretum. Took Secundo to the peds today to see how his cuts were healing from his encounter with the "playful" pit bull next door . Took him to the school only to discover today was the field trip that had been postponed from last week. He was frantic, of course, so I insisted I'd drive him there. He wasn't sure if that was allowed, but off we went. We get there, we can't find the group, of course, b/c the property is huge. We finally find some nice employee named Betsy, who takes us on a little motorized cart over to where his class is. They're walking out and preparing to get on the bus. Secundo starts to cry, so they make a big deal of having him do his little planting project, and then this other nice docent person took us on a personal guided tour of the greenhouse, where we saw nice flesh-eating plants and an actual banana tree and where he easily answered the docent's softball questions. It would have been a nice opportunity if he'd been in a better mood, since he's Science Guy, but he did perk up at the notion of getting his own tour.

I feel like joining the Planting Fields just b/c they were so nice to my kidlet. He also got asked a lot of questions about his arm and what had happened to it, so he got a ton of attention, and then he got the bus ride back to school with everyone, which is the Most! Fun! part of the trip.

Walked around there for awhile; wish I could have stayed longer, b/c I do love it there. I started to do the same thing I do whenever I'm someplace like, I don't know, Le Hameau at Versailles, where I'm charmed and then the lefty daughter that I am kicks in and I start thinking about how it was built on the backs of labor, etc., and how excessive, really, it was, and how could one family have so much? And then the other annoying thing I do: "Oh, built by Olmsted? As in Frederick Law?" [No, as in Bill. How many landscape architects named Olmsted could there be?] "Didn't he help design Central Park?" [which I knew the answer to perfectly well, but still, at my age, I have to show off like the shmuck I am]. The docent didn't give me a gold star or otherwise identify me as a Model Tourist.

But there were bromeliads with their little teacup environments that hold frogs, and the cedar tree that wraps around and around the trellis, and the orchids, whole roomsful of them, and dahlias, few of which were blooming, and a greenhouse full of camellias that I couldn't visit because my feet were hurting so much (wrong shoes, yet again). I ended up reciting Hopkins, which may have weirded out the tourists who walked in right after me, but sometimes you need Hopkins:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.