We along with Stephens went ahead with our plans to camp in the Algonquin Provincial Park and celebrate the Thanks Giving Day of 2015. (Please click here to read more about Thanks Giving Day). The children were excited about the camping and visit to the park to view the fall colours, especially after the good times they had in the summer camp in Northern Ontario.
Algonquin Provincial Park, about 7,600 square kilometres in area, is located between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River in Central Ontario, Canada. Over 2,400 lakes and 1,200 kilometres of streams and rivers, formed by the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, are located within the park. The park is in an area of transition between Northern coniferous forest and Southern deciduous forest. There are over 1,200 campsites in eight designated campgrounds. I booked the Campsite # 45 at Achray Campgrounds in July for the October camping. Most camping sites are booked well in advance as only the early birds will catch the prey. The best time to view the fall colours in the park is during the Thanks Giving long weekend and the traffic on the roads are heavy with campers and tourists. After this weekend, the camp is closed to visitors and campers.

(Image Courtesy Google)
Achray Campground was selected because it was well into the interior of the park with no electricity and cell-phone coverage and also for the view it offered. Achray Campground is located on the East side of Algonquin Provincial Park at the southeast end of Grand Lake. The drive from Toronto took about 7 hours with the last 50 km accessed via a gravel road.
On entering the park, all vehicles and visitors have to register at the main gate and obtain necessary permits and passes. The park staff will brief about the rules to be followed, Do’s and Don’t’s, procedure for garbage disposal, etc. After the registration, we drove about 25 kms on the gravel road to the Achray Campgrounds. The store in the campground, the ‘Stone House’, was part of a railway depot complex that was built in the 1930’s, made with stone quarried on the opposite shore of Grand Lake. The store offers canoe rentals, ice, firewood, chips, chocolate bars, camper’s supplies and park merchandise.

We settled down at our campsite and after a sumptuous lunch, embarked on to the Jack Pine trail, in search of the place where Tom Thompson painted his famous painting ‘The Jack Pine’ which hangs in the National Gallery. Thomson worked as a fire ranger at Achray in 1916. We reached the spot marked with a plaque where the pine was (tree has since died), which inspired the artist.

The walk up to the plaque was mesmerising with the vivid red, yellow and orange colours the leaves of the deciduous trees – maples, birches, poplars, tamarack, etc – had turned into. The coniferous trees with their green needles added variety. The varied colored leaves and the brown pine needles that had fallen on the ground and in the cracks in the rocks provided an interesting view.

The green leaf colour comes from pigments of chlorophyll, used by the trees to make food with the help of sunlight. There are other pigments namely carotenoids and anthocyanins present in the leaves, but are overshadowed by the chlorophyll in the spring and summer. Carotenoids create bright yellows and oranges like in corn, carrots, and bananas. Anthocyanins impart red colour to fruits like cranberries, red apples, cherries, strawberries, etc.

In the fall, trees break down the green pigments and nutrients stored in the leaves. The nutrients are shuttled into the roots for reuse in the spring. Some tree leaves turn mostly brown, indicating that all pigments are gone. Trees respond to the decreasing amount of sunlight by producing less and less chlorophyll and eventually stops producing chlorophyll. Now the carotenoid in the leaves show through and the leaves become a bright cascade of various shades of glowing yellows.

The fall season being characterised by short days and longer and cooler nights. When a number of warm, sunny autumn days and cool but not freezing nights come one after the other, the Maple leaves produce lots of sugar, but the cool night temperatures prevent the sugar sap from flowing through the leaf veins and down into the branches and trunk. The anthocyanins are now produced by the leaves for protection. They allow the plant to move down the nutrients in the leaves to the roots, before they fall off. The nutrients stored in the roots help the trees to sprout out their leaves in the coming spring. During this time, the anthocyanins give leaves their bright, brilliant shades of red, purple and crimson.

In a maple or a birch tree, the tender thin leaves, made up of cells filled with water sap, will freeze in winter. Any plant tissue incapable of living through the winter must be sealed off and shed to ensure the tree’s survival. As sunlight decreases in autumn, the veins that carry sap into and out of a leaf gradually close. A layer of cells, called the separation layer, forms at the base of the leaf stem. When this layer is complete, the leaf is separated from the tissue that connected it to the branch, and it falls. Coniferous trees like pines, spruces, cedars and firs, don’t lose their leaves, or needles, in winter. The needles are covered with a heavy wax coating and the fluids inside the cells contain substances that resist freezing. Evergreen leaves can live for several years before they fall off.
It is easy to track the changing colours on the Ontario Parks’ website with suggestions for the best viewing locations and links to ‘Great Fall Drives’ around each park. There’s also the Ontario Tourism’s fall colour report starting soon at http://www.ontariotravel.net.

In the evening, we celebrated the Thanks Giving with a dinner – but not with the traditional Turkey Dinner, but with chicken barbeque.
As per the old military adage, I decided to take a different route on our way back home the next day. The route was mostly through the country roads up to Peterborough. The roads passed through many townships, all dependant on agriculture and diary interspersed with few timber mills to convert the abundantly available wood into lumber. The region was hilly with many streams and small lakes and again a spectacular display of fall colours.

Visiting Marina’s sister Charm and her husband Cherian at Delaware, USA, every summer for the past decade, we always plan to visit the Longwood Gardens. The visit materialised only in the summer of 2015. The Longwood Gardens, one of the world’s greatest gardens of today, was established by Mr Pierre Du Pont when he purchased Peirce’s Park in 1906 in order to save the trees in the park. The park owner had contracted a lumber mill operator to remove the trees from the park.

Mr Du Pont was born in 1870 in Delaware, USA. He was president of the world famous DuPont Company from 1915 to 1919, and served on its Board of Directors until 1940. He also managed General Motors from 1915-1920, became GM’s president in 1920 and served on GM’s Board of Directors until 1928.

During his early years in Wilmington, Delaware, he was influenced by the area’s natural beauty and by the Du Pont family’s long tradition of gardening. His jobs took him to Europe many a times and he was always exposed to a wide variety of garden settings, fountains, grand architecture and the latest technology.

After buying the Peirce’s Park at the age of 36, Pierre started to create a garden, which today is the Longwood Garden. He built the gardens piecemeal, beginning with the Flower Garden Walk and he followed no grand plan or design. He added an open-air theatre in 1912, inspired by an outdoor theatre near Siena, Italy. He then added the “secret” fountains that drenched the unaware visitors.

As a wedding gift to Alice Belin, whom he married 1915, he added a conservatory – Longwood’s first “winter garden” and planted exotic foliage and created a small marble fountain. In 1921, he opened the Conservatory, a perpetual Eden which used the latest technology of the day to heat, water, and power the complex. All the systems were hidden in tunnels so as not to detract from the grandeur of the glass-covered and surrounding rooms. He then opened the greenhouse to the public.

By the mid-1930s, Longwood had grown from the original 202 acres to over 1000 acres due to Pierre’s purchase of 25 contiguous properties over the years. Today the Longwood Gardens has a yearly budget of nearly $50 million and a staff of 1,300 employees, students, and volunteers. Longwood is continuously evolving to become one of the world’s greatest gardens.  The garden is open to visitors year-round to enjoy exotic plants and horticulture, events and performances, seasonal and themed attractions, educational lectures, courses, and workshops.

The Longwood Gardens consists of 20 outdoor gardens and 20 indoor gardens within 4.5 acres of heated greenhouses, known as conservatories It contains 11,000 different types of plants and trees, as well as fountains. The Gardens also has extensive educational programs including a graduate program, and extensive internships. It hosts 800 horticultural and performing arts events each year, from flower shows, gardening demonstrations, courses, and children’s programs to concerts, organ and carillon recitals, musical theatre, fountain shows, and fireworks displays. It also hosts an extensive Christmas light display during the holiday season.

Longwood Gardens is renowned for its extraordinary fountains. The astonishing shows gather attention from far and wide, and are a favorite among visitors of all ages. Inspired by the success of the Italian water gardens and open air theatre fountains, Mr Du Pont unveiled the Main Fountain Garden in 1931. The goal was to rival the fountains he had seen in Europe. Today, this open air theatre conducts fountain shows featuring 750 jets in changing patterns, this showpiece comes alive with five-minute shows set to music. Since its 1914 Garden Party debut, this Italian-style outdoor theatre has expanded from its simple original fountains to the 750 jets that create the rainbowed curtain of water.

Tucked into a protected courtyard (accessed via the Conservatory), this stunning outdoor garden features aquatic plants from all over the world. The garden is open from late May through mid-October. Peak bloom occurs mid-July through September (depending on weather). The water-lilies and tropical aquatic plants are displayed here in five large pools. The aquatic plants consists of lilies, lotus and incredible Victoria water-platters with leaves measuring up to four feet in diameter. This leaf might have been used to float the infant Lord Krishna, to be discovered by Markandeya. The same leaf could have been used by Kunti to float infant Karna and also may have been used in the case of infant Moses.

The Orchid House displays a fraction of the 7,500 orchids at Longwood Gardens. To ensure a continuous display, the orchid grower hand picks and replaces the plants three times a week with others from the five orchid growing houses. Orchids were a passion of Pierre Du Pont and his wife, Alice. Orchids were one of the first plant collections—started in 1922. In 1948, the collection was greatly enlarged when Pierre  DuPont’s sister-in-law, Mrs. William Du Pont, donated her well-known and respected collection of more than 2,300 orchid plants to Longwood.

The Palm House opened on Palm Sunday, 1966 with a landscape of palms in all sizes and shapes from all around the world. Mr Du Pont preferred temperate houses because they were less expensive to heat and only the small conservatory in the Peirce House was warm enough for an occasional palm.

The Silver Garden houses the cacti collections. Through the glass roof the moonlight appear to bounce off the gray and silver-foliaged plants that fill this garden. This mimics the dry and arid landscapes found in Mediterranean and desert regions. Slate, rocky outcroppings, and exotic plants combine to create this multi-textured garden. The gray-blue slate pathway gives the impression of a dry streambed that would be found in a desert. The greenhouse containing this garden was built in 1921 and was originally used to grow peaches and nectarines. Following a major structural renovation, the Silver Garden came into being in 1989.

These are some of the few specialities of the Longwood Garden and must be included in the itinerary of anyone visiting this part of America.