Alaska Botanical Garden

Tonight is a Harvest Hosts night for us. We are overnighting in the parking lot of Alaska Botanical Garden, which means we went in this afternoon and enjoyed all the beautiful plants, flowers, and trails that this place had to offer. There are several different garden areas along a paved path, as well as some additional trails to take you through the forested area. We won’t bore you with writing about each garden area, but if you are interested, that information can be found on their website.

As you can imagine, the stars of this show are the plants and flowers. We are not great with knowing one plant from another and we definitely do not have green thumbs, but we can enjoy a beautiful garden as well as anyone else. Above are some of our favorite plants and flowers that we encountered.

In addition to the flora, there were also some art and accent pieces included to enhance the gardens.

Wildlife can also sometimes make its way into the Alaska Botanical Garden. There are signs everywhere that it isn’t unheard of for a bear to wander through. For this reason, no food or drink is allowed past the main entrance, in order to minimize the chance of bear encounters. We did not see any live bears while we were here (see the art piece above), but we did encounter two EXTREMELY noisy ravens. No kidding, they were so loud that they could be heard throughout the garden and were drawing quite a bit of attention!

Our take on the Alaska Botanical Garden…For people like us who aren’t extremely into plants, it was a nice place to walk around for an hour or so, but we did find it to be a little pricy. $14 per person seemed high to us, to wander around a garden for a while. If you are really into plants, though, or if you are a photographer, this could be a really great afternoon. As a Harvest Hosts location, it is ok. There aren’t many choices in the Anchorage area, so it was good for that reason, but you are literally just staying in their parking lot. There is nothing special or scenic about it. Our favorite Harvest Hosts locations are when we are immersed in the place we are staying, like the night we spent in the middle of a vineyard; this one is definitely not like that. We do like that they only allow one rig to overnight per night, though, so we weren’t listening to someone’s generator or music all night.

We have a couple of nights left before our next reservation and, as usual, we aren’t entirely sure where we will end up, but there are big plans in the works for the next week, complete with a special guest, so stay tuned!

Until next time!