I had grand plans at the beginning of the school year that we would do a field trip each month. Ha! That didn’t happen, but there’s always next year, and this was a busier year than I expected when I made those plans.

Anyway, yesterday we did field trip to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. I had never been, and was really looking forward to it. We had a guided tour, then a picnic lunch in the park, and then a little more time in the Gardens. If it had been just a teensy bit cooler, it would’ve been even better! (No, the girls did not plan on matching; it’s just a result of great minds thinking alike!)

About twenty kids from our local homeschool group went on this field trip, with a wide variety of ages. Our guide did a great job of entertaining the little ones, like when they were pretending to be plants (below).

We liked seeing all the poison dart frogs in aquariums in the rain forest area. They are not poisonous like they would be in their natural habitat because the foods they eat in the wild are the source of the toxins in their skin. Here, they mostly eat fruit flies and crickets.

Also in the rain forest exhibit were turtles, and even quail! We saw banana trees and cocoa trees, and were amazed at the HUGE leaves on some of the trees. I’d never thought about the fact that the big leaves help rain-forest plants shed the great quantities of water from annual rains. By contrast, the plants in the desert have tiny leaves or spines (like this plant below) to hold on to every last bit of water, since they receive such little annual rainfall.
I enjoyed the parterre, and found the glass sculpture (by artist Chihuly) fascinating, even though modern art isn’t really my thing.
I’d never seen pitcher plants in real life! They were part of the bog area of the Gardens.

And of course, the rose garden made me happy! These blush-colored roses were some of my favorites, shown here with sweet peas in the photo below.

We saw plants from Africa, South America, Madagascar, and other countries, and although I don’t know how much sank in for the girls, I was thinking it was a great little bit of added information for the countries we’ve been studying for months! There were several areas of the Gardens that we were just too hot and tired to see today, so we’d like to go back again sometime.

Want to see more photos from our day? My flickr set is here.