We went to the Norfolk Botanical Garden this weekend, where I haven't been in seven or so years, it was a nice place to spend the afternoon. It didn't hurt that there is a large rubberized area colored like the globe with dozens of waterjets for Lark to run through. Here she is running along the west coast of Africa.



The Garden folks are no fools--make the kids happy with a waterpark in the middle of the garden and the parents are much more amenable to shelling out for the place.

Actually, it is a nice Botanical Garden as these things go, especially since this climate can support such wide diversity .

In the middle of it all is this tree, which seems a bit unimpressive save for the gate around it.



It turns out this is one of the rarest trees in the world, a Wollemi Pine. There are only 100 matures Wollemi Pines in the wild. They were discovered in Australia in 1994, though the fossil record of them goes back 90 million years.

(I am kind of surprised that the Botanical Garden wasn't compelled to add a mention that the 90 million year old fossil record is only a theory, since the earth is in fact only a couple of thousand of years old and clearly Noah took the Wollemi Pine on the ark to save it. But this is the Norfolk Botanical Garden, not the Virginia Beach one, so it is ok to recognize the fossil record.)

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