Thursday, May 31, 2012

Roses, Roses and More Roses -- Maplewood Park

It was such a gorgeous day out, it seemed like the perfect time to go visit Maplewood Park, another of the parks designed by Frederick Law Ohmsted.  Later on they will have a rose festival in the park but with the warm temps, I figured that the roses would be in pretty much full bloom.  They have an amazing collection of 3000 rose bushes covering about an acre of land.  The festival is usually in mid-June but you can see there were many roses in full bloom (and even some over the hill already).


This was one of my favorites called The Julia Child.  There were many shades of gold and yellow and it is a floribunda and there was a carpet of color.
You can see how the park is set up here with rows and rows of rose bushes in the bright sun -- good thing it was a nice cool breezy afternoon!
Another gorgeous display of color.  There were a lot of these pink bushes.
This was my very favorite.  It was climbing up a trellis on the side of the park.  I usually prefer the really double roses but I loved the colors and texture of this one.  As it aged, it turned whiter.  
This was another one I liked a lot called Scentimental (it's in the collage up above as well) and as its name indicates, it has a wonderful strong scent as many of the roses did.  With the slight breeze, the whole area just had this wonderful aroma!


This was another view down the row of roses with the stone wall to the left which of course had more roses and another path.


And a picture of the nice husband who patiently waited for his wife to tour the whole area -- he got through it much faster than I did!!


And here is a totally random picture of the Serendipity quilt I am working on now.  I am hoping to have it eventually large enough to fit on the king sized bed in the blue bedroom at the beach. It is much subtler than this picture shows -- I think because the main fabric is a sateen.  There is no where near this much contrast.  I will be using white as the filler in the background as well.  This is a different version of the block than I have done before as I didn't think the fabric was "strong" enough to make stars in the middle of the hexagons.  It was hard to find the lights I needed in my stash but I think I have enough.  The block with the darker greens may not make the cut -- it was the first block and this has happened before....  

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