B Is For… the Bellevue Botanical Garden – with a Twist!
As we really get going on the A to Z Challenge, I wanted to share what it’s like to visit the actual garden. And since it’s the Bellevue Botanical Garden, I get two “B’s” for the price of one!
The Bellevue Botanical Garden
The Garden is located outside of the city of Seattle, Washington State, USA. Bellevue used to be a sleepy bedroom community, but in the last couple decades the population has exploded and major companies have hubs here: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, to name just a few.
The Garden has a great website, located here, with information on featured plants and their cultivation, rich photographs, and a robust calendar of events. It’s just 53 acres, but once you’re there it feels like you’re not in a city the size of Bellevue. It’s truly a refuge worth coming to.
What I like as a garden visitor is that scattered throughout the Garden are stakes with QR codes that patrons can use to access information about particular exhibits and the featured plants. If you haven’t encountered a QR code, according to Wikipedia: “QR code is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode first designed in 1994 for the automotive industry in Japan. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that contains information about the item to which it is attached.”
Most modern smartphones can interpret these, and if you don’t already have that capability, navigate to your phone’s app store and look for a free “QR Code Reader.” Then, when you find a code you’d like to read, open your phone’s reader and position the phone’s camera over the code. Wait a moment and your phone will ask you if you’d like to launch the reader – in the case of the Garden’s codes, my phone asks if I want it to open the Garden’s web page. I took a screenshot of one of the results, so you can get an idea of the wealth of information:
Tomorrow we continue our A to Z tour with the letter C. Since I found some birds that will satisfy my letter D, I’m not quite sure what I’ll do for C; so I’ll be just as surprised as you are. See you tomorrow!
If you are participating in the A to Z Challenge, please leave me a note in the comments so I can come visit you back. Happy reading!
What a lovely theme!
I\’ll check back for more of the big picture. 🙂
Happy A-Z\’ing.
Thank you!
A little bit off-topic, but when I first heard of QR readers, I was working for Queensland Rail, commonly referred to as QR. I was really puzzled as to why QR had these things all over the city and why people would want to read them. Felt like a bit of a doofus when I found out the truth.
Oh, that\’s funny! 🙂 I work as a day job at an insurance company whose initials are GM, which to me means, General Motors, the American car manufacturer. 😛 Isn\’t it interesting how we get used to things meaning specific things?