More of the Edison and Ford Winter Homes-and a Snow Report

 Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week. 

 Yesterday we were dumped on with snow, but not as much as they got out in the western part of the state where my daughter lives. Some towns had 32 inches/81 cm of snow by late afternoon yesterday, and the snow wasn't done falling at that point. I wrote this post last night so I can't tell you what our final snow amounts are until I  get out of bed and check this morning. 

But here's what it looked like around 6 PM last night when I went out to do my last back deck shovel of the day.

The snowy fence next to the bird feeder is my entrance into my veggie garden. Who knows when I'll be able to get into my garden, but I bet it's not going to be gardening season too soon. 😕

FYI-today's post is rather long and photo heavy.

In my last post (yesterday's T Day), I wrote a brief introduction to the Edison and Ford winter estates in Fort Meyers Florida. Today let me share some photos as well as my Florida journal pages I made based on our visit back in January.

I had read a book in 2022 about Ford's and Edison's friendship called  The Vagabonds by Jeff Guinn. That book was about many road trips these men took together, along with Harvey Firestone (of Firestone Tires) and also John Burroughs (an environmentalist). Having been told about these historic homes and also having read that book had made me want to visit their estates in Fort Meyers.

One thing that I heard about before we visited the winter homes was the amazing banyan tree you see when you arrive.  This tree was planted by Thomas Edison about 100 years ago because one thing he was experimenting with was finding another source for the plant latex used to make rubber. (It turned out that rubber trees still have the best plant latex for rubber production.)

Banyan trees are related to fig trees, and they grow  all these prop roots down from their branches. As you can see in both of the above photos, it looks like you are in a forest of banyan trees, but this is actually just one tree with many many prop roots. It's huge.

I wasn't sure how to show this in my journal, but I really like this abstract style page I ended up making.

Edison and his wife were also both big into gardening. And of course Edison, being a prolific inventor, also had a very large well stocked lab to work on his experiments during the winter when he was away from his home lab in New Jersey. That inspired me to make this next page in my journal.

In honor of the Edison's love of plants and to also help raise money to maintain the estates, there is a great garden center where you can buy plants and other garden supplies. Good thing I was flying and  not driving home because I could have gone crazy otherwise.

And here's some garden photos from on the estate itself.

These next 2 photos are banana orchids which I found really fascinating.

And I love all the bamboo textures, colors and designs.

And let me include some of Edison's studio photos also, including this fun statue outside the entrance to his working space.

And I love this vintage lab.

And finally, here's my journal page I made about my lunch after we left the estate. I shared this restaurant with you yesterday.

I'll share more photos from my visit in this weekend's post.

I'm linking my trip journal pages up to Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey

Thanks for visiting.