Green Spring Gardens

On the Saturday before Memorial Day, we had a great family outing. We went to GreenSpring Gardens in Annandale. It is such a great place. There is a manor house you can tour, but we didn't the kids would like that. We spent time in the horticulture center, walked around, and went to the children's garden. It had a "wizarding" theme" The kids loved it.

Here they are at the little table set up for kiddies.

Spencer found a friend. He loved this gargoyle and wanted to take him home.

We also thought the dragon in the flowers was cool. Spencer would have taken him home, too, if we could have!

They have a cool vegetable garden at Greenspring. It has tons of funky veggies, and here is one of our favorites. The kids called it an alien veggie. I forget what exactly it is!!
We walked through the woods to the area with 2 little ponds. On the way we stopped and walked by a stream and threw rocks in. We made it to the little pond area and found that it was a great area to hang out and explore. We had been given the heads up about a snake, and I spotted him but when the kids made lots of noise, he went under a rock so Darin missed him. He was bummed about that.

We walked all around the ponds, looked at rocks, flowers, turtles, and geese.

The next few pictures are of cool reflections that I really liked.


There were tons of wild flowers all over the place. Lots and lots of bumble bees, as well. I found this little guy getting a little lunch.
Spencer decided to take a little break and look up some bugs. The visitor center has backpacks you can take on your walk that are filled with guide books, magnifying glass, journal and crayons, etc. The kids loved them, although they fought over the purple one-Jordan wanted it because it was purple, Spencer wanted it because it had the stuff on bugs, instead of the blue one which had stuff on the wild flowers. Typical boy:)
I sort of put the pics out of order. Here is a collage of our walk and some at the gazebo between the two little ponds.
There were a few families of baby geese. They were pretty cute and we got pretty close before the mommies would hiss at us. Landon LOVED them and would try to get as close as he possibly could. I was funny, but you never know with geese-the ones at Kingstown are totally mean-so we wouldn't let him get too close.
If you live in the area and have not been there, it is FREE so you should go!! Kids love it, grown ups love it, and I have been told they have Free concerts there in the summer on the huge grassy area. I'm going to try that next:)