Bret Marfut topic of choice 4

I spent several weeks of last year studying at the University of Oxford, in England. While there, the group that I was with took a trip to Blenheim Palace, home of a current Duke. The palace was beautiful. It was incredibly ornate, and it was impossible for me to wrap my mind around the fact that each decorative figure carved into the trim of the palace was done by hand. While the craftsmanship represented by the Palace was incredible, one memory that stays with me most from the trip actually had to do with the land outside of the Palace. After we finished our tour, we were invited to look around the grounds. I walked with a few other people, and we followed a path that led to a few famous sites and sculptures. As we were heading back toward the Palace, someone saw a spot on the map near where we were labeled the secret garden. Since we were already in the area, we decided to try to find it, and, not seeing any paths heading that direction, walked off into the trees. The trees were all similar, some kind of dark green pine tree. We walked through these trees looking for the secret garden from the map with no luck. However, as we were looking, I walked around a tree and found a single plant, some kind of vividly purple flowering shrub, that was the only non-pine tree for probably fifty meters in any direction. It was a really cool thing to see, even though it was not the secret garden we were looking for. We eventually found the secret garden after we returned to the path. It was nice, and had a huge variety of awesome plants, but it did not have the same effect as the single plant in the woods.