Back East, Where the Gardens Are Pretty

Dear Diary,

The title of this page is an example of something called "bait and switch".  That is, I'm going to tell you about parks to the east that are near many pretty gardens, but I'm not actually showing you any pictures of those pretty gardens.  Sorry!

This time of year, of course, many gardens are gorgeous.  But these three parks are in rich neighbourhoods where just about all the gardens are - at least now - gorgeous.  The parks, of which I will show you pictures, vary in beauty.

I visited them Monday, the last day of the heat and the first of the current occasional rain.  Monday morning as usual I went to Burke-Gilman Playground Park for water.  There was a pleasant surprise:  the dryer in the men's room had been fixed.  I stayed around for a while, doing my current morning routine, but then headed to the first park despite the rising heat.

University Circle

This is a traffic circle.  It isn't all that close to the UW; instead the name refers to the fact that all the streets thereabouts are named for universities.  The circle, in particular, is where Vassar, Ann Arbor and Princeton Avenues meet.  It's up a very steep hill from BGPP, which I probably shouldn't have climbed in that heat.  It's the prettiest of these three parks this time of year:

Belvoir Place

After I recovered from the climb and descent, sometime around 3 P.M. (I don't deal well with hot weather), I went to Safeway and got breakfast, starting to eat it as I headed for the other two parks.  This made me something of an evildoer, because those two are southeast of University Village, past the lands of the Center for Urban Horticulture with its varying levels of "Leave No Trace" ethos, and it's hard to leave no trace of having eaten tortilla chips in a strong wind.

Anyway, though, if you take Mary Gates Memorial Drive, it eventually turns into 41st St (the least reasonable way to Laurelhurst Playfield).  A short way on, 41st intersects Surber Drive, where private land with pretty gardens starts.  Surber ends at 42nd Ave, down which you'll find Belvoir Place the park, which even has a sign.  There are, according to my map, two streets near there named Belvoir Place; I noticed the further, some blocks from the park, but not the nearer.

Belvoir Place the park is a small access, for people and for small boats, to Union Bay.  The neighbours on each side have matching big boats, somewhat dominating the view.  I'm quite sure this simple park doesn't hide a restroom; I could conceivably have missed a water fountain, but I really doubt it.

Union Bay Boglands

Once you've found Belvoir Place the park, it's a simple matter to go back down Surber and, by a process of elimination, figure out how to enter the part of Union Bay's surviving bogs that belongs to Seattle, as opposed to King County (Belvoir Pump Station) or the University (Yesler Swamp).  The Seattle park part starts with stern but anonymous warning signs:

OK, I guess they aren't very readable; the yellow letters are, of course, "No Parking", which you see me violating with my cart just then, while the white sign off to the left says "Dump No Material Whatever".  There's a paved road, of all things, and it does lead to plumbing, but only in the form of the aforementioned Belvoir Pump Station.  Confusingly, the signs at the bottom of this drive are from the University:

One of them warns that the boardwalk can be slippery when it rains; I think it means this:

I didn't venture nearly far enough into the boglands to find that boardwalk, just stuff like this:

But as I walked away I did find something genuinely neat - carvings in an ordinary fence:

All for now, dear Diary, but I'll probably write two more pages in you later today, because I expect to be gone for a few days after that.