Today Meg and I visited Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, NC. It was a beautiful day to visit,hardly anyone was there. The sun was very bright and taking landscape photos were a big challenge. Meg told me at the beginning even though I'm not much of a tulip fan I'd be one after visiting today, she was right.
Airlie Gardens has lots of tulips planted in mass. Shame in some areas lots were dug up by rodents, hundreds!
Given the sun problems Here are some of the photos I managed to get.
These giant yellow tulips were huge. I'm sure I saw several that were 7 inches wide! There were 4-5 masses of these in the camellia garden.
Just a sample of the tulips in the gardens. Those are pansies planted along with the tulips.
The drive had this ring of daffodils, those trees are a ring of vitex trees. Would enjoy seeing those vitex in full bloom, but that is much later in the season.
We found some daffodil foliage that was clearly 2 foot tall, the blooms were gone, never seen any daffodils even close to that tall.
Flowering Dogwood with Spanish Moss.
A cherry tree that caught my eye.
See the yellow on top of the concrete pagoda? That is the top of the pagoda path covered in Carolina Jasmine.
Here is the Airlie Live Oak estimated to be almost 500 years old. FYI that gray stuff is Spanish Moss hanging down from the tree.
Thousands of camellias in bloom! Never seen so many in one place. Most of the camellias were planted 80-90 years ago in the gardens. Seems the theme is multi-colored and huge blooms. Surely I saw blooms approaching 6 inches across.
This red camellia is challenging the camera's color tones, I worked hard in photoshop and still did not get it right. Anyway I have a whole another post of camellia photos if you want to see them?
One last note about camellias. The person we were visiting, you would think her yard was part of the camellia garden at Airlie gardens. There is a nice selection of camellias all huge bushes. We brought home 6-8 camellia seedlings from her yard!
