And the weather breaks

After ~4 days of overcast, driving rain and miserable cold, Tuesday dawned...

...overcast, rainy and cold.

But that all changed at noon when the clouds finally broke and the sun came out. We had to get outside despite the chilly weather to take advantage of it, so walked across town, past pretty tram lines...

I like when they do the grass thing

...past the Dutch military moving bits of road up a canal...

What? It even has lines.

...to the Botanical Garden. The garden's not big, but it's really well done. Obviously more set up for locals than us visitors, some of the descriptions take a while to figure out.

What's not hard to figure out is how important the gardens were to identifying, introducing and protecting plant species not just from the Netherlands but from wherever the Dutch East India Company would go. This story on coffee, for instance.

Who knew?

There were lots of interesting and rare things in the garden, including endangered trees only found in "captivity", the world's oldest potted plant, and others. There were birds...

Not rare, but photogenic

...and bees. There was a wonderful show on called "Table Topics", looking at plants we eat, how they get to the table, and food through history.

Artfully laid out lettuce. Prettier than your vegetable garden

There are several exceptional greenhouses, including one dedicated to palms.

The Palm greenhouse

Sparse but pretty

Three others are interconnected and feature tropical, desert and the South African Cape. Why the Cape? Because it's the smallest of the globe's defined unique bioregions.

Pretty pool 

Birds of Paradise, of two kinds... 

Cactus flowers 

This succulent demonstrates the Fibonacci sequence 

A pretty flower

Patterns in ferns

A great photo by Karen of a fern

While we were in the greenhouses, a bride and groom were there getting their wedding pics done. Even I was impressed by her wedding dress.

The photographer primps the dress 

You don't see a lot of fuchsia wedding dresses 

Posing for the photographer 

Heck of a setting 

Dress details

And... they have a butterfly garden, which is hot and humid and almost kills you to stay in it for any length of time. But, you get to commune with about 500 butterflies who like to pose for you.

Big dude 

Dramatic orange dude 

Stripy guy 

Looking a little worse for wear 

Black and orange guy 

More dramatic orange guys 

More stripes 

A different big one 

More black & white 

4 at once

We really enjoyed the garden despite it's size. We walked home from there, too, which by my measurements is ~4 km. On our way home, we saw them setting up for the May 4 Remembrance Day and May 5 Liberation Day celebrations.

Cranes erect a stage and bleacher on the Amstel River