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Pond of the Blue Moon and bird- and gator-watching at Shangri La Botanical Gardens

Pond of the Blue Moon and bird- and gator-watching at Shangri La Botanical Gardens

December 16, 2022

Yesterday I introduced you to Shangri La Botanical Gardens & Nature Center, which sits withal a bayou in Orange, Texas, right at the Louisiana border, and I shared a tour of the inner gardens. Today I’ll well-constructed the tour starting at the when of the 250-acre property, where a whirligig of water known as Swimming of the Blue Moon reflects the surrounding garden. The garden’s website explains:

“In James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the mystical Shangri-La was located in the Valley of the Blue Moon. Within the modern Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center, the Swimming of the Blue Moon is a reflection of the original Shangri-La gardens of H.J. Lutcher Stark, inspired by Hilton’s novel. During the 1940s Mr. Stark used the reflection of visculent azaleas in Ruby Lake to provide overwhelming eyeful for his visitors in springtime. In the present day Shangri La, the same effect is recreated at the Swimming of the Blue Moon with many of the same varieties used by Mr. Stark.”

You’d have to come in early March to see the azaleas in bloom. I visited in early November and enjoyed subtler colors, including tinges of rusty orange in unrobed cypresses.

Pond of the Blue Moon and Cypress Gate

A vaguely Asian-style gate made of towering cypress trunks stands in the middle of the pond, wieldy via a zigzagging boardwalk that floats wideness the water. This is Cypress Gate, built of cypress logs salvaged from a massive blow-down caused by Hurricane Rita in 2005.

I love this diamond — and that not everything has to be sealed off with railings. Here, as in Japanese gardens, you must watch your step so as not to end up in the water. It’s shallow, but still.

Pretty autumnal containers greet you at turning points withal the boardwalk.

Bald cypress trees grow on little islands in the pond, with water-loving grasses and other plants springing up virtually them to make untried skirts. I read that Orange receives an stereotype of 60 inches of rain per year — far increasingly than Austin’s 33 inches (and sadly we’re only at 25 inches this year). I was amazed by all the water at Shangri La, not just the Blue Moon swimming or Wetland Demonstration Garden (see Part 1) but moreover Ruby Lake, Adams Bayou, and marshy areas just off the trails. It’s a variegated world here withal the Gulf Coast!

A curved fountain wall helps muffle traffic noise from a nearby road.

Garden rooms

Along the pathways through the garden I enjoyed coastal Texas views like ferns, live oaks, and masses of Texas dwarf palmetto.

A post with old copper wedding adds a musical accent.

A shady garden path

Lots of firespike (Odontonema cuspidatum) in bloom

You know hummingbirds love these.

In a sunny border, I worshiped taller palms, masses of tentacle-armed foxtail ferns, and yearly verisimilitude in old sugar kettles.

Marigolds, croton, millet, and other showy fall annuals in a sugar kettle planter. If you’re not from the South, sugar kettles were used in the 1800s to swash lanugo sugar cane juice, and you’ll see these rusty old vessels used as planters in many Southern gardens.

Those foxtail ferns

One increasingly sugar kettle planter

Sunlight shining through the trees

An early camellia in bloom

Water management is a big thing at Shangri La. Our guide Jennifer Buckner, the garden’s director of horticulture, told me that rills like this one, thick with water-loving plants, move water from one part of the garden to another. I can’t recall if this is part of the water-cleansing system or for irrigation, but it was interesting.

Water canna (Thalia geniculata) with its paddle-like leaves and soft-hued flowers pendulous from fishing-pole stems

Native Gulf muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) in cotton-candy flower

Scarecrow Festival

The garden’s yearly Scarecrow Festival had just ended, and volunteers were taking lanugo the displays. The townsfolk really get into creating “scarecrows” and we saw some fun ones, like this Thanksgiving turkey made out of air conditioner and fan parts.

A skeleton scarecrow with Dia de los Muertos energy

An Edward Scissorhands scarecrow and pumpkin lady sitting for a haircut

And here’s a giant bird scarecrow — a crow to scare crows? — made out of palmetto fronds by students at Nederland High School. Bravo!

Ruby Lake bird blind

A bird veiling on 15-acre Ruby Lake provides an opportunity to watch anhingas drying their wings without diving for fish. Shangri La, like other parts of southern Texas, is a unconfined place for bird watching, expressly between March and May, when birds like herons, unconfined egrets, roseate spoonbills, and wood ducks may be seen nesting or passing through.

And alligators! I spotted this big boy or girl lounging on a sun deck in the middle of the lake.

People in gator country are pretty blasé well-nigh them, and Jennifer was too when I asked her, at the start of our tour, if alligators are found in the garden’s waterways. I was excited to see one.

Jennifer told us that during the saltwater inundation from Hurricane Ike in 2008, a lot of unrobed cypresses in the lake died, reducing habitat. The garden has brought in tons of soil to create a berm extending out into the lake and plans to replant trees on it, giving them a little uplift whilom the water level.

One increasingly squint at the anhingas

Nature Discovery Center

Our last stop was the Nature Discovery Center, a screened-in pavilion in Shangri La’s cypress-tupelo swamp proximal to Adams Bayou.

Inside you find a table displaying bones, alligator skulls, turtle shells, and other natural objects to handle and explore. Screened windows all virtually offer views of the swamp.

Although it’s currently not operating, the garden moreover offers an hour-long wend excursion through the swampy bayou tabbed the Outpost Tour. I’d love to do this one day.

If you missed Part 1 of my Shangri La tour, click here. From there you can follow links, starting at the marrow of that post, when to all the gardens and nature hikes during our road trip from Austin to Asheville and back. I hope you’ve enjoyed traveling with me!

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