Wickham Park

I recently had the opportunity to visit a friend of mine over in Connecticut. I’ve never been to New England before (the closest I’d been previously was an hour spent in a New York airport, and given that I can’t even remember which airport it was, it clearly wasn’t the most fun visit), and I was pretty excited to see the sights.

Seriously, I’m never going to stop enjoying panorama photos.

The first place we went that made me glad I’d brought my camera was Wickham Park; it’s up on more of a hill than I initially realized, which made for a good panorama at the top.

I have an impressive number of photos of paths in my collection.

A bit lower down, there are a few different ‘gardens’ around the park; the first one we wandered around was the ‘marshland’ theme, if I’m remember correctly.

Every once in a while, I wish my DSLR could take a Live Photo, because the sound of all the birds when I was taking this one was pretty great.

Honestly, I think the top and bottom of the hill were the best parts; the gardens in between were… not all that impressive.

The “Oriental Garden”, for example, featured a rather sad pagoda and a very slimy pond.

I also didn’t bother taking any pictures of the “Irish Garden,” which looked like what happens when someone in the 1930s makes a garden, and it becomes too ‘historic’ to tear down for being a racist caricature. An aesthetic that was rather undercut by the sign at the end, which says it opened in 2016.

The “Scottish Garden” was a bit more interesting in the statuary, but rather lacking in actual plant life.

When we visited, I read through the pamphlet a bit, but it mostly boiled down to a list of all the different gardens, a brief mention that it was named after the rich fellow who’d established the place, and the fact that it’s a private park, owned and maintained by Bank of America on behalf of the family’s estate. (“Everything around here is owned by some bank of another,” I was told.)

Oh, you thought I was done with the panoramas for this post, didn’t you?

But hey, it’s sitting on some pretty land, and I do like seeing parks that’re at least somewhat open to the public, so who am I to complain?

(Technically speaking, this is also a panorama, just not as intensely so as they usually are.)
(It also wasn’t taken at Wickham Park, but still.)