Journey Through the Botans

September 24th, 3:00pm
I had only been to the botans once before thispast trip, and that was with my colloquium so my taste to explore what was around me was never fully satisfied. Upon reaching the Botans, the first thing I did was walk over to the point with the waterfall to look for fish- for whatever erason, my first initial reaction whenever I see a sizeable body of water is to look for fish- but much to my displeasure, I couldn't see any fish. In fact, there were so many little yellow plant seeds on the surface, that I could barely see any water at all! The only part of the water that wasn't covered in the stange little plant seeds was at the mouth of the waterfall where the flow of the water kept pushing them away. I looked around the pond for some source of seeds and saw plant types rancing from mint, to holly, to ferns and grasses as well as several types of aquatic plants, but could not locate the source of all the seeds. As I went to write down my observation about the pond, I noticed a tiny little green but with a black stripe and 2 black spots crawling across my paper. Noticing this bug called my attention to several other tiny bugs that were slowly crawling across my paper. I could identify one of them as an aphod, as to what the rest were I am completely clueless. Most of the little bugs had wings; however, much to my suprise, several of them did not. At first I wondered if it were just the bright color scheme of my paper that was attracting all of the bugs, but upon glancing down at my jacket sleeve and viewing even more bugsthere than were on my paper, I realized that it was just me the bugs were flying to. I almost felt bad for the poor little things as I stepped away from the pondand brushed myself off; the bugs were obviously landing on me for a reason, and all I was doing was sending them back to whence they came.
Upon wandering around for a little while longer came across a peculiar flowering plant that I had never seen before. The plant itself seemed to have one stock that broke off into multiple smaller stocks at a single point. From there the stocks grew straight up towards the sky and opened up into little tiny flowers at the top. Some stocks were almost 7 feet tall, others were only around 2 or 3. The flowers that this plant bared were not like regular flowers; the closed buds looked like pinkish-purple rice; when the buds open they release 5 separate strands of white silk-like petals. I smiled when I realized that these plants had the same soft and delicate nature as the blossoms from eioa in Avatar. Thoughts of Avatar and the circle of life in all of its connectedness took me into a state of dreaming. Then, suddenly, my day dreaming was broken when I saw a suspicious movement in my peripheral vision. I jumped back, expecting to see a garden spider. Much to my relief, it was a mere bumble bee. Oddly enough, I found the bumble bee's presence to be quite comforting. However, the idea of spiders being in the garden still made me feel slightly neurotic so I quickly scrawled down what I had seen and left the Botans for spider-free territory.