What’s it like to visit the Botanical Garden in Solingen?
Lyons Cub has visited several attractions in Solingen already:
- Burg Castle
- The Galileum
- Playground Engelsberger Hof
- Solingen Bird and Animal Park
- Fauna Animal Park
- Tiki Kinderland Indoor Playground
- The Christmas Market at Castle Grunewald
Today, we set out to visit the Botanical Garden, which already exists since 1963. It was July 2nd, the day of the pineapple festival (but alas, mommy had forgotten her wallet in the car, so we couldn’t buy any pineapple treats). Lyons Cub soaked up the many colors and smells of the flowers, herbs, plants, and trees like a sponge.
The biggest attraction for us was the succulent house. Leander had never seen such big cacti before!
Lyons Cub admired the prickly-pricklies and just tried to touch a few of them softly. Some looked like a big, long worm with tiny babies. Even the ones looking like moss were quite rough.
It was a bit warm in the succulent house, so grandma stayed outside on a park bench and waited for us.
We liked the blooming cacti a lot. There were yellow, orange, pink, and white blossoms.
Actually, it was quite nice to seek refuge in the calm of the succulent house because a jazz band was playing loudly outside for the visitors of the pineapple festival.
Afterwards, we went into the orchids house. It was a bit humid, but we were rewarded with gorgeous shapes and colors of different orchids. They reminded me of my honeymoon in Hawaii, where David and I had visited the Botanical gardens of Honolulu.
After the orchids house, we admired a HUGE leaf:
It was almost as big as Leander!!
Lyons Cub loved the meat-eating plants. He has a sundew (drosera) at home, which he faithfully feeds (with dead flies he finds on the window sill).
And then, we went to look at the outdoor plants, where we saw the most amazing rose garden:
In the park, we saw huge insect houses explaining what critters they housed and how they lay their eggs and care for their nymphs. Leander saw several holes already sealed by the mama insects to host the future generation:
The sign reads: “Looking for an apartment. Wild, single, is looking for…” and describes how “single mothers” (i.e., insects) are looking for nests to have their babies and take care of them. Wild bees build 20 to 40 baby dorms, filling them with an egg and food each, in their short, four to six week-long life. Building one nest takes a female a whole day! After about 12 months, the next generation is hatching. The sign also explains that there are so-called “cuckoo bees” that do not build a single nest by themselves but put their own eggs in other bees’ nests. If those larvae hatch, they suck out the egg of the host bee or kill its larvae, and then eat the food not designated for them in the first place. Argh!!!
Before we left the Botanical garden, Lyons Cub was allowed to climb on two giant metal ants (one of which had rather pointy monster teeth ;)) and a butterfly:
It was really nice! We’re planning to go to different botanical gardens, maybe the glass dome in Düsseldorf…