Barnette Family Happenings: Putting A Little Spring in Our Step... in Chapel Hill

Our family visited the North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill this week, which are owned by UNC. The university's botany students maintain and do research in the gardens, which are free and open to the public. It's definitely a relaxing way to pass an afternoon...

Anna Jean was by far the most excited of the five of us about the flowers. She danced and smelled her way up and down and through the paths. And when she finished, she had a tell-tale sign of having dipped her nose in some springtime...

There were times that I fully expected Peter Rabbit or Benjamin Bunny to jump out and say "hello" to us! The Botanical Gardens look like a page out of a Beatrix Potter book...

The yummiest part of the gardens were the herb gardens. With so many herbs growing together, when the wind blew just right it smelled like something was cooking. In the picture below, John walks beside a bay bush: those are bay leaves like we put in Italian recipes.

And in the herb garden, the students had decorated a tree with kitchen utensils. Cute.

But one of the coolest things that the UNC students had done was to create a giant chess board out of spray-painted pots and garden equipment. They even let visitors play!

The "poison plants" section contained a few too many itchy plants for my comfort. Yes, they intentionally grow poison ivy in there, I suppose in the name of research. I walked in to take this picture and then skeedaddled right back out...

The Paul Green Cabin had been located to the Botanical Gardens in the 1990's. Paul Green is a Pulitzer-Prize winning North Carolina author. He wrote a book about the Lost Colony, which was later made into a play in Manteo in the Outer Banks.

The boys had a fun time looking for plant markers that had funny names:

And John posed proudly beside a buckeye tree. Having once been one.

(A Buckeye...not a tree. :D)

And with Tim being Tim, he couldn't leave without finding a 3' black snake, who happily smiled for a picture. (I think that little guy is smiling....but then again I could be wrong.)

One of the restaurants I had always wanted to try in Chapel Hill was the famous Mama Dip's. Mama Dip's serves classic southern cuisine: it was named the 2nd best restaurant in the South in 2009 and was the feature of an article in Southern Living magazine in 2011. Tim had fried chicken and pinto beans. I had salmon cake and turnip greens. The best thing Mama Dip's serves, though, has to be their mac and cheese. Yum.