Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden - Myrtle

I was taken by the bare look and smooth texture of these trees.  It was almost as if they weren't real.  As if they had turned to petrified wood.
 

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden - Hands

I love the eager spirit and waving pastels of this little exhibit, and I love the young lady in the light sweater, too.
 

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden - Web

Inside the Tree House is a web, and this web is the many different people we are.
 

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden - Tableau

From the Kids' Tree House, we see tableau vivant of the Garden.
 

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden - Bicycles

First, the alter ego. In his artistic life, John adopts the name Giovannia Meola from his beloved father, who was a machinist in a follow-the-handbook world of New England factories. The son dedicates his unorthodox art to the man who taught him how to work with tools and so introduces a sly, freewheeling universe where a saw blade becomes a tea table to be plucked for purchase from an art gallery or hidden away like contraband, too sacred to sell.

Then there's his burning need to express. Meola keeps logbooks on nearly everything he encounters: verbal sketches, ideas for projects, "recipes for madness," he laughs, rifling through dogeared volumes stuffed with notes and commentary from his worldwide adventures. "The Existentialists, the Beat poets, still define half my imagery," Meola says. Favorite authors are William Gaddis and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it's a Warren Zevon quote that revs him up: "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

Reference: One man's trash is John Meola's treasure.

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden - Roses

Beauty Abounds in the Rose Garden

Imagine the splendor and fragrance of nearly 2,000 rose bushes massed in a 9,000 square-foot hillside rose garden. This is the allure of the Rose Garden, which in 2008 was tripled in size, expanded in variety, and elevated to national significance.

Sensually enchanting, the Rose Garden entices visitors to pause, come close and savor its offerings. Its arbors, stone arches, and pavilions are draped in more than 70 varieties of blooming roses that originated from nurseries in France, Italy, Germany and England with an emphasis on genetically superior hybrids bred for diseases resistance, rebloom, and fragrance. Environmental responsibility also guided selection, so as to reduce the need for fungicides. The garden’s hillside location, which provides natural air movement, further minimizes the onset of fungal disease.

Reference: Rose Garden.