This past week, to celebrate my birthday, Jim and I went to the local botanical gardens.  We’ve been visiting there since it was first opened, so it has a special element above and beyond have become an extraordinary facility.  Remembering when the trees that now shade the central green were slender and leggy give an additional delight to seeing them spreading shade all around.

There have been changes, as any place created around living things will have.  Overall, we like those changes.  Newest to us of all this visit was the recently re-opened Heritage Farm, which has grown astonishingly since that days when, to provide interest in a bare area, they marked out an acre so all the city folk would know how much space that entailed.

There were plenty of flowers, still, including the morning glories featured above.  I think they look as if they blossoms have been adorned by a talented watercolor painter. 

As we ambled around—we were there for between two and a half and three hours—I was once again reminded why I like living here.  The general attitude seems to be to assume that if you’re in the same place as someone, they you must already be friends.

Among many delightful encounters was the fellow who wanted to make sure we saw a particularly amusing squirrel, then went on to tell us how he’d lived in Albuquerque for seventy years and this was his first visit to the gardens.

“I made sure my kids went, and my grandkids, but this is a first for me, and I just love it!”

Then there was the man harvesting grapes over at the Heritage Farm.  When we asked who would be eating them, he happily told us how he worked for a local winery and they tended the grapes and would be making wine from them.  He told us where their tasting room was in Old Town, and was generally a delight.

And then there was the little girl who we joined to look at some truly magnificent fish in the main “lake.”  She was feeding them, and without any prompting offered me a handful of fish treats so I could join in. 

A new garden is about to open in early October, near where the pollinator garden was, and maybe we’ll make it back to see it in its new glory, so we can enjoy saying later one, “Remember when?”