We had hoped to visit Humboldt Botanical Garden yesterday on our way to Ferndale from Ashland, but the trip took longer than I’d expected, so we would have been lucky to get there before the last entrance for the day. We decided it’d be smarter to wait and go there today – and we were right. We spent a little over three hours in the garden and could have spent longer if we’d brought lunch.
The garden is on the campus of the College of the Redwoods, a two-year private college that specializes in career education; in fact, the road leading to the garden warns drivers that trucks have the right of way and cars might have to back up to let them through…and you’d better believe it, because the people driving them are learning how as part of their degree program! Fortunately, we were there at a quiet time for the driving school.
We began our exploration in the formal gardens, near the entrance.
One of the highlights of the garden is “All Happy Now”, an earth sculpture which is a cross between a ziggurat and a labyrinth. It’s about a mile from the entrance (depending on which paths you take to get there and back), and the walk in the sculpture is another half a mile. The weather was perfect – cool and not too sunny.
We climbed up to the Oliver Eitzen Lookout Point on our way back to the entrance so we could get a good view of Humboldt Bay.
One of the highlights of the Garden is the Lost Coast Brewery Native Plant Garden, so we thought it only appropriate to visit the Lost Coast Brewery & Café in downtown Eureka for lunch. We didn’t see any plants there, but did enjoy the food and beer.
We also visited Dick Taylor Chocolate; we could have taken their weekly factory tour if only we’d spent two hours less in the Garden. Maybe next time.
We left downtown Eureka and charged the car at Bayshore Mall, then returned to Ferndale and the Gingerbread Mansion in time for wine and goodies. Then we walked back into Ferndale to work up an appetite for dinner, starting with another quick visit to the Ferndale Cemetery.
We walked up to Main Street and then towards the Ferndale Bridge (well, as far as Town Hall). On our way, we stumbled onto Hadley Gardens, a quirky garden devoted to native plants and wildlife, with a side order of solar power (there’s a Tesla Powerwall in the hobbits’ toolshed in the photo below).
We went back to Ferndale Pizza Company for a light dinner – we split a personal pizza!
Tomorrow, we leave Ferndale for home.