Chapel Hill & Durham, NC (I stayed with friends in Chapel Hill, but mainly took pictures of things in Durham)

The Sarah P Duke gardens in Durham. Pretty plants, pretty water, well-designed pathways, and lots of ducks. There also seemed to be a pagoda and mill-stone theme to the decor; I'm not quite sure how these two go together.

The famous Duke Chapel. AAA marked it as a "gem" for reasons that I don't quite follow... Don't try to park there. You can walk from the gardens. That is, if you really want to see it. It's very... gothic. Though there are little pointy bits that look sort of like sprouting corinthian capitals, which was somewhat entertaining.

Chapel Hill! These are from the UNC arboretum, which covers only about a block, but is very lovely, and has good plant lables. At the right here is fetid, or stinking helebore, which I had seen before, but not in bloom. It smells a little musty, but not really all that bad. Like buttercups (to which it is related) only much stronger.

Here is the pitcher plant, native to the marshy bits of North Carolina. (So is the venus fly trap, by the way.) The pitchers were looking a bit the worse for the winter (which I'm told was a hard one-- the actually had multiple snowfalls!) and so it probably won't be catching any insects soon, but it's clearly happy enough in it's little circle of artificial marsh to be settings seeds. The purple line you can see in the picture is the edge of the plastic tub to keep the rain in; it's about the diameter of a garbage can. On the right is an unfolding fern. Cinnamon, I think.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: The Duke Chapel