Where was I?

Hints:

Beavers make dams there.

A heron flies overhead.

The Great Blue Lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) was blooming just off a gravel trail.

A fallen tree became a nurse log where seedlings of all kinds germinated amongst the moss and decay.

There’s also a prairie area, but I didn’t get a good picture of it. Imagine lots of goldenrod.

Where was I?

I was at the Nina Mason Pulliam EcoLab on the campus of Marion University, walking the trails with other members of my garden club.

This restored/preserved area of 75 acres is behind the Allison Mansion which was built by an early auto racing pioneer, James Allison, and his wife in the early 1900s. When Mr. Allison died with no heirs, the bank took possession of the property until the Fransican Sisters of Oldenburg bought the property in the 1930s to put a college there.

Around the front and side of the house is a Jens Jensen restored landscape.

The landscape is nice and a pleasant place, but you can see it all in about five minutes. (No disrespect to Jens Jensen or those who restored it. It’s a nice venue for various events, and fits in well with the house, which I didn’t think to take a picture of.)

But out back, in the ecolab, you could walk that trail for years and never see all that there is to see.

Free and open to the public.

Six miles from the center of Indianapolis.