Dubuque botanical garden sprouts beautiful flowers

The beauty of flowers. The fragrance of the flora. Nothing says summer like a walk in a flower garden.

That’s what we did one night to cap a day of activities during our visit to Dubuque. The Dubuque Arboretum and Botanical Garden was a nice way to spend about an hour.

The botanical garden isn’t huge. It’s nicely sized at 52 acres. It allows people to spend time among flowers and plants without having to plan half a day to do it.

The botanical garden has a series of subgardens – including hostas, annuals, deciduous, English, Japanese, perrenials, Rose and a Veterans memorial.

As you enter the arboretum, you see the beautifully designed Veterans Memorial.

We enjoyed a nice stroll through the entire garden.

The hostas garden was interesting. Our eldest daughter put in some hostas in our front yard a few years ago. This garden was rather large with hostas plants throughout the area.

I’m far from an expert when it comes to flowers. I know what roses look like, and a few others. But, I usually can’t look at a flower and tell you what kind it is. However, I do enjoy the beauty and fragrance.

As we walked through the garden, we noticed the variety of colors with the flowers – orange, yellow, pink, etc. They were nice to view.

During our walk, we encountered some wildlife. A bird was perched nearby.

Of course, we had to work to get pictures of the elusive ground squirrel. The little bugger would stand still long enough to let me start to focus, and then he’d scurry off. We had to wait for a while in order to finally get a few decent photos of him.

The Dubuque Arboretum and Botanical Garden is free to the public. I recommend visiting it when in town.

For more information on the botanical garden, please visit its website at http://www.dubuquearboretum.com/.