Spring perspective: Prospect Terrace

Spring 2008 arrived this morning at 2:05, but you wouldn't know it by the weather. A light rain is falling with a heavy overcast and a temperature of 42.
But just a couple of evenings ago, you could feel the spring coming from the pretty East Side overlook park called Prospect Terrace, where this couple sat watching the sun set from the best perch in the city: a park bench near the towering statue of Providence founder Roger Williams, watching over the city he started in 1636 at the base of this hill.

Probably even at that time, courting couples came to this spot to look out over the Great Cove of Providence, now covered by all those downtown buildings in the space between the State House (which was built atop a small hill that jutted into the north side of the Cove) and the turreted Industrial Trust tower, which sits on land that was at the southern shore of the Cove.

Just about a block in length, Prospect Terrace is located at the intersection of Cushing and Congdon Streets in a lovely residential area of the East Side. Anyone who has lived in Providence for any length of time feels nostalgic here, remembering long-ago people and long-ago times in the city that Williams named for "God's merciful providence" to him and his followers in their time of distress. (He had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for holding "diverse, new, and dangerous opinions" challenging church-run government.)

Prospect Terrace is an easy walk from the Brown University campus and the East Side. From downtown, walk up steep Thomas Street next to the First Baptist Church in America, and turn left at Congdon.

Greenhouse effects: The Botanical Center

With ski season skidding to a halt in New Hampshire and reports drifting in of "wet snow," "loose granular," and the dreaded FLG ("frozen loose granular") conditions up there, we're sticking around home more on the the weekends. Yesterday I decided to check out the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center on Elmwood Avenue in Providence.
Opened just a year ago and billed as "the largest indoor garden in New England," the center is far more modest in scale than original visions called for, back in those heady economic times when the expansion of the old Smith Greenhouses in the park was first floated.

Basically, the Center is three large greenhouse garden rooms planted with tropicals and exotics arranged attractively around fountains, walkways, pools and stonework arches. There's a rock pond full of brilliant orange carp, and special displays are devoted to carnivorous plants and orchids. Admission is $3.
As soon as you enter, your glasses fog up to let you know you've entered a different climatic zone, one that's warm, green, and humid, with no FLG in sight.

Yesterday, dozens of members of two photography clubs were busy setting up tripods and cameras to practice their technique. A bunch of the guys were hoping to catch a Venus Fly Trap or Pitcher Plant in the act of cannibalizing a bug, but it looked to me as if it would be a long wait for an action shot like that.

If you like indoor gardens, check out two of the best in New England: The Lyman Estate Greenhouses in Waltham, Mass. and the indoor courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.