A Small Bear adventure at the Lovell Quinta Arboretum

 At the weekend, our human guardians decided it would be nice to go out for Sunday lunch, for the first time in ages.  Polar suggested we should have a walk first and Grizzly picked the Lovell Quinta Arboretum, not far from Congleton, as where we should go.

Endon, who loves plants and gardens, was the first out of the Bear Bag when we arrived, as he loves plants and gardens.  Hanley, who is very keen on science, was excited to be there too when he found out that the arboretum had been founded by a famous astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell, who was responsible for the big radio-telescope nearby at Jodrell Bank.

Polar and Grizzly set off on their walk in warm sunshine, with us bears running along the path beside them.  Soon we came to a long avenue, with plenty of really good climbing trees for small bears.

Huddlesford and I found a tree with nice, sturdy branches and climbed until we reached comfortable places to sit, although Endon wanted to get much higher up.

Then Hanley and the cubs came scrambling up the tree as well, so Huddlesford and I moved to make room for them all and asked Polar to take our photos.

It was lovely feeling the sun on our fur and not too much of a cold breeze, although we couldn't stay in our tree too long, as we didn't want to lose sight of Polar and Grizzly, who were making their way further along the avenue.

Luckily, Polar was spending a lot of time taking pictures with her new camera and they were moving quite slowly, so we had time to climb down from our tree and catch them up before they got to the gate into the wild woods.

We even had time to explore more trees.  Endon climbed up into a pretty conifer to sniff the needles and look at the cones, and the cubs found a little stumpy branch to play on.

Polar helped us all into the Bear Bag to go through to the wild woods, because the path was muddy.  We saw lots of dens and climbing logs for human cubs to play on and there were families using them, so we waved to the human cubs from our bag, and some of them waved back. 

Hanley asked Grizzly if he could sit in his jacket, like he does when they go to the match, and Grizzly agreed.  Hanley liked looking at the birds and scenery through Grizzly's binoculars, but got very scared at one point because he thought a big buzzard was much closer to him that it actually was.

The path through the woods brought us to a viewpoint where we could look across the lovely valley of the River Dane - the same river that runs under the aqueduct at the bottom of the Bosley Locks, north of Congleton.  Hanley said this was more evidence that Staffordshire was the best county in England, so he was quite put out when we reminded him he was in Cheshire!

But he didn't stay grumpy for very long, as we came back into the arboretum and found there were flowers all around us - rhododendrons, wild daffodils and then a huge drift of snowdrops.

We jumped out of our Bear Bag and climbed up on a twiggy hedge for a better look, but we couldn't decide if there were more snowdrops here than we had seen at Rode Hall.

"Can we run right to the other side of the snowdrop woods to see how far back they go?" I asked Polar, but she said we probably didn't have time, as we mustn't be late for our lunch booking.

We made our way back to the car park - and the pub - along another avenue, this time of very tall trees, which we couldn't climb as the branches were too high up.  There were two ancient oak trees nearby, which we could have climbed, but we decided it would be disrespectful to these old trees to do so.  

There is a lake here too, although it needs some work done to it to keep more of the water in.  The staff and volunteers who look after the arboretum are hoping it will be repaired very soon, then it will look really lovely.

Soon, we were all settled around a big round table waiting for our Sunday lunch and Hanley was allowed some bubbles from Grizzly's beer.  

It had been a lovely morning but the day wasn't over, as we were going to see some interesting things on the way home.  I will let Hanley tell you all about that in the next post.