Lavonardo

Visited the Montreal Olympic Park, site of the 1976 summer olympic games, and these days a centre piece of a largish park. The tower’s elevator car had problems, so decided to look at the other attractions first.

Skipped biodome, a nice enough indoors zoo and concentrated on the botanical garden and a collection of insects housed within it.

First stop on the long meandering walk through the park is the japanese garden. Which contains all the expected elements - lots of bonsai trees, a fancy tea garden (which is unfortunately off limits), a very zen gravel yard and as the encompassing design, a large pond at whose shores the rest of the elements reside. Really liked the pond, with its koi carps, carefully designed rocky environment and a waterfall to add movement to the otherwise very static scene. Not easy fitting such a creation into a typical finnish yard, but clearly possible - and the ambient temperatures ought not to present no problems, since Quebec experiences harsher winters than Finland by far.

Quickly walking through the shade garden, we feel the first raindrops fall - sky is not totally ominously dark, but hints at prolonged rain. Hence, decide to move to the indoors stop at a brisk pace.

Indeed the next location on the map is a tree house, surrounded by a huge arboretum (several square miles on a quick calculation). The house itself is pretty much a natural history museum on its own, concentrating on forests, and an adjoining courtyard has yet more bonsai trees. By far the most elaborate design contains (according to the official description) a princess riding a dragon across the sky. The tree house contains no real trees, but even browsing through the samples is educational - never knew how much differences there can be between the weight of tree species (with cedar being bt far the lightest).

The rest of the arboretum falls by the waysides as we continue onwards, it would take ages to visit the trees properly. And in the continuous drizzling rain, there isn’t much incentive to.

The First Nations garden contains plants that were used by the natives. Corn, berries, birch bark are all prominently featured. Multiple biotopes are featured, from southern canadian forests to the nordic zone. One of the many souvernir stores of the park is located here, and I end up buying two cans of caribou meat before moving on.

The next stop, where we arrive after travelling through labyrinthic forest paths is the chinese garden, with all the expected trappings (a big pagoda, couple of other buildings) in full view. There’s an interesting exhibition about rice growing, but I end up missing the actual rice paddies outside.

A small garden features species of poisonous plants. And there are indeed quite a few that I’ve never actually seen before - only heard or read about. Poison ivy turns out to be quite an innocent-looking species, whereas deadly nightshade looks every bit the part. Some plants in the garden are considered poisonous for allergenic purposes (like timothy), but most are indeed egven more hazardous to health. An adjoining garden contains medicinal plants, and there’s quite a bit of overlap inbetween the two.

The collection of greenhouses, ten in all, houses most of the garden’s collection. Each house is devoted to a biotope, or group of plants, and the selection ranges between jungle and desert. Orchids are very prominently represented, but no carnivorous plants at all seem to be among the flora. Yet more bonsai trees turn up, as do clear relics from the flower-powered sixties. The temperature inside the greenhouse is actually cooler than on the outside, and some of the rooms have very functional fans to make the environment even more comfortable.

The extremely odd “living baseballs” were on sale in the greenhouse shop, but would have been hard to transport, and there was a big sign over the cashier stating that every shipment outside Canada must be cleared with the relevant authorities. Clearly, that would have been too much of a hassle to go through.

The walk to the next stop, the insectarium goes through the chinese garden again, with views to an alpine section inbetween. Noted that moving water, with or without the japanese trappings around it would indeed be a good addition to any future gardening effort.

The camera’s battery started to show off a worrisome red light at this point, so a lot fewer pictures from the remaining stops exist.

And actually there are no pictures at all from the insectarium. Wanted to save batteries for a couple of shots from the tower and thought I’d buy the relevant guidebook from the local shop instead, but they only stocked inappropriate or french books there. The selection of insects was good, on disgust scale ranging between “hey, nice” and “double-eww”. Not really concentrating on either end. Some highlights: several species of stick insects, a fully functional leafcutter-ant colony, couple of beehives where the insects have access to the rest of the garden, beetles in many shape, color and size, a tank filled with aquatic insects. Some tarantulas and hissing cockroaches fill out the set. The collection is mainly live, but the walls are lined with butterflies collected all over the world.

The view from the leaning tower is good, with access all around the building. Not very high, but definitely high enough to allow for a score of miles visibility in each direction. The view is marred mostly by dirty and lightly tinted windows, but I’m sure some smog comes into play as well. The funky pyramidal building in the left-most image is part of the olympic village - probably dormitories for the athletes.

On the way back to the hotel heard the first finnish sentences (apart from those spoken by us, of course) on the trip. Might have been just a tourist family, or some attendee-collateral from the currently ongoing swimming world championships.