Sensational Sunrise

The sunrise this morning was absolutely breathtaking.  The image above is true color and remarkable. I've seen some many nice sunrises over the years just above the tree line across Palmer Drive from the Horticulture Center.  It was another decent day in terms of weather although it looks like some snow in the forecast for Sunday evening.  Most of our "gardening Grumpies" are taking the winter off as we're in pretty good shape out in the gardens.  We may see some return for the takedown of the Holiday Lights Show (HLS) in January.  There still are some gardening tasks left including some late planting of donated, spring-blooming bulbs.  I'm actually picking up another donation of spring-blooming bulbs tomorrow so if any of our volunteers are reading this blog, come in next week and we'll get these planted!  Our carpentry Grumpies were here today (sans Vern).  Below are Jim, Dave and Bob A. (left to right) working on multiple projects.  They have about five projects to juggle right now and we'll see some lumber arriving shortly to keep them out of trouble.  Del came in this morning to work on his reindeer cutouts (second photo down) and Bob C. popped in to mention that he'll continue sanding down some of our benches at home.  He did a dynamite job on one of our teak benches recently.  Dr. Gredler was in for some painting as was Urban.  Dr. Gredler can be seen below painting our bike rack a nice cantaloupe color.  The bike rack also echoes our color schemes every year.  Dick H. ran our last three loads of debris for the year to the dump. Urban was seen later in the day pruning crabapples (Malus) too!  Bill O. came in to help Larry and did some more garden clean-up here and there.  Maury was in to run some errands and we also saw Deb G., Lynn S., Bev D., Mark S. and Polly.  I was gone a good portion of the day so inevitably, I'm sure I missed seeing some of our volunteers.

I was invited to do a presentation about RBG for the Rockford Rotary Club today.  I was recruited by Dave and Al from that club back in the summer when they visited the gardens and wanted to share RBG with their membership as well.  My talk was very well received and was held in the beautiful Memorial Hall (seen below) in downtown Rockford.  I had a nice lunch and great discussions with many of the members, most of whom had not been to the gardens (yet).  I never tire of "bragging up" the gardens and enjoyed sharing our history, volunteer efforts, accolades, collections and of course, I offered an open invitation for everyone to visit (perhaps starting with our upcoming Holiday Lights Show!).  The third photo down shows the heavy fruiting of a hawthorn (Crataegus) right next to Memorial Hall.  This was one of those times I was happy to have my camera.  I did accomplish some tasks both this morning and afternoon and Larry kept busy with a wide range of projects and is quite self-directed this time of year.  Back to the seed catalogs tomorrow (hopefully).  At the bottom is another scary gnome.  I remember one of my college professors telling how his neighbors had a sizeable gnome collection in their yard and whenever the neighbors travelled, he and his wife would go over and move their gnomes around and position them in odd locations and in "interesting" positions.  Apparently he didn't like these neighbors much!