A Visit to Brooklyn Botanical Gardens- Autumn is Coming!

We've all felt the shift. It's coming! Autumn. 

It dropped down to 60 degrees Sunday night! 

Ehhh-  I wasn't ready for that. I've been a bit anxious about the shift. To me it just means soon winter will be here and I am very far from ready for that. 

But! This week has been beautiful. So, I have come to terms with accepting Autumn's arrival. After all, it is the most beautiful(maybe tied with Spring, in my opinion) and definitely the best smelling season. This week really was like someone hit a switch and boom the season changed. Last week was a crazy, muggy, heat wave. Monday brought cool nights, fresh drier air, clear skies and that smell! You can smell the leaves! I could be making that up but I feel like it's the leaves I'm smelling. 

I want to get the most of this season change so I decided to visit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for a stroll through their Native Flora Garden. I am ashamed to say that this was my first visit (and I live very close by)! But I wanted to get in there and check everything out now so I can see how everything changes in the next few weeks. 

On Sunday, I went and took a guided walk with Uli Lorimer, the curator of the new section of the Native Flora Garden. It was a great informative intro to the garden. Here is some of what I saw:

Jewelweed

 Jewelweed, Impatiens capensis, also goes by the name 'touch-me-not' because of it's awesome seedpods that when touched uncoil like a spring and shoot out their seeds. Very cool. 

End of season blooms in the understory of the old section of the Native Flora Garden. The bees are busy gathering as much as they can before the cold comes. 

Entering the meadow

The meadow is the newer expanded section of the Native Flora Garden. On the walk, I learned that most of the plants in this new area were started from seeds collected in the wild from the surrounding NY- NJ area.

The grasses! Autumn is the time for ornamental grasses to shine. They are dramatic wispy rays of sunshine. The meadow has so many different species such as Little Bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium, which turns reddish and then bronze later in the fall. 

I spent twenty minutes chasing around some monarch butterflies trying to get a photo but this is as close as one would let me. It's there! That small sliver in the upper middle of the photo on the white flowers. 

I did find a monarch chrysalis though on some Tall Boneset, Eupatorium altissimum. It was near the swamp milkweed, which is the monarch caterpillar's food source. 

Some Milkweed bugs going to town on the milkweed.

The Eupatorium plants smelled sooo good that ALL the insects had to visit. I took a video to show how active it was but I'm not sure it'll work here. 

Let's see:

Here are a few other random facts I learned on my walk:

• Spicebush is the sole larval host of the spicebush swallowtail. That means no spicebush, no swallowtail.
• Native Americans used the resin of the Sweetgum tree medicinally.
• May Apples, which are dormant now but bloom in the spring, have little low hanging fruits that box turtles eat and then spread the seed.
• Cherry birch is actually what they used to make root beer from, not sassafrass like I always thought,
• The pond in the Native Flora Garden is no longer covered in algae but now is covered with the smallest flowering plant on Earth, Wolffia.