Treehouse Day

Tyler Arboretum is having a treehouse exhibit this summer, and we rode over the other day to see it. Nothing as elaborate as the Longwood treehouses, but imaginative and clever just the same. Like Longwood's, these treehouses do no structural damage to the trees themselves.

Signs throughout the exhibit which winds all over the arboretum tell how trees enrich our lives by providing food, shelter, beauty and inspiration to people.

One of my favorites was "Nesting," built from about 8,000 wooden dowels and thousands of plastic zip ties that look like giant nests hanging in the tree limbs. Look closely to see the large blue nest hanging behind the orange nest.

Birds do this on a smaller scale all the time. They gather twigs, pine needles and feathers and then weave them all together to make their nests. You obviously cannot go up into this, any more than you would disturb a real nest in the trees.

Another one I liked a lot was "Hanging Out." In this one, you are invited to lounge in the hammocks inside a grove of trees and just daydream.

The "Cape May Bluebird House" was cute. It was built to resemble a little Victorian Cape May house and kids were running in and out of this one. They had several real nesting boxes around this but, with the amount of traffic and general busyness at the site, I don't imagine they got many feathered takers.

I was also taken with "The Bell House" where they had cowbells attached to cords up in the branches that you could pull on to make music. When people weren't ringing the bells, the wind would do it.


At one spot on the trail, they provided something like a duck blind where you stood on a platform and looked through a slit cut into the front which directed your gaze to this. . . a magnificent tree.


The large meadow in the center of the arboretum was lovely this time of year with all the mature grasses and wildflowers.

This is just a small sample of all the treehouses on view, too many for one post.

It was a good day and a good walk and lots of fun to see.