People give the entire state of New Jersey a terrible time. It's as if it were simply destined to be the butt of jokes because some state had to be, and Jersey's number came up....I don't know. It doesn't help that it hasn't got a single city that's got the stature of it's Pennsylvania, or New York neighbors' greater cities; nor that it's decades of polluted air from the oil refineries in the northeastern part of the state are drive through souvenirs as one traverses the New Jersey Turnpike. But I recently learned (though I haven't checked that this is true) that NJ has more millionaires than any other state in the union. It also has some of the loveliest and most cultivated wealthy suburban and semi-rural areas I've ever visited. It has some pretty damn good universities too i.e. Princeton, and Rutgers, and one helluva popular Atlantic Ocean coastline.

The two photographs below are from a Morris County park called Willow Wood. It's an arboretum that is easy to walk through, and lush with a rich variety of plantings that offer wonderful flora that bloom and strut their stuff during the different months and seasons of the year. We will return to this pocket paradise again...and perhaps many times...to paint and photogarph it's vivid beauty.