Merlin’s Hollow, Best Of The Last Visit

It was another great visit accompanied by great weather conditions, sadly it was last one for the season, to the Merlin’s Hollow, an English garden created by the Tomlinson’s here in Aurora.


No worries, there is always next year. More flowers to capture and more stories to hear. Along with everything else being great, this visit brought another new line of blooming flowers. The garden has over 1500 plant species, and I only captured about 50 of them during July 10, 2011 visit.


How many flowers in your garden? Have you ever counted them? You will be surprise how fast they add up. I thought for a second about my flowers. Oh no, I have none. Yes I do, and since they are perennials I don’t have to think about them. I have 6 flower species spread all over my property. I don’t really have defined garden, but where ever there is piece of land to experiment with seeds – I will dive for it. The biggest coverage I have right now are lilies of the valley and forget-me-nots.


Since my child is very adventures and likes to pick and lick, I had to remove some of the plants. Clematis flower apparently is poisonous, so for time being the vine had to go. I don’t remember the name, but I used to have this beautiful plant with white cone shaped large flower. Well the seeds were hallucinatory, so eventually it had to go.


This plant also reminded me an incident I always laugh at. One time a lady from our sub-division was trying to steal some seeds, but because the stem was very fibrous, she had a hard time to break it off. She was really fighting the plant, I guess she was determined to get it.

I wanted badly to come out with the scissors and snap some for her, but at the same time I did not want to embarrassed her. Well she managed to get some and managed to destroy half of my plant. Oh well.


‘Mommy look, look‘ – Matthew called me and kept pointing. I came and I saw this big black beetle trying to climb the flower stem. Its been a long time since I saw one that big. He was having difficulty climbing. Kept sliding off. I took few snapshots, and he flew away. Only when I reviewed the photos later, I found out that he was injured. He had one arm missing.


During second last visit to the garden, Mrs. Tomlinson looked on one of the photographs I gave her and smiled. ‘I just love the architecture, isn’t that amazing‘, she commented. She is right. Each flower has its own design and architecture. Patterns are unique to each flower cone.

Flowers look beautiful at very stage, even when they do not bloom. Especially when you look at these.

Want to work on your imagination? Dose it looks like someone want to eat the flower on the two photos here, above and below?


How about the colors? I don’t know how much I can say about colors, but I can definitely say that I have seen every color of the spectrum. It is amazing just by looking at the purple or yellow colored flowers, but if you look closer, there are many tings or shades of purple or yellow within.


I hope that you enjoyed this years photo gallery of some of the flowers from the Merlin’s Hollow garden, and if you did not visited yet, I encourage you to do so next year. Pictures are nice, but the real thing is much better.

‘Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden.‘ – a quote by Robert Brault.