Bash/Mud Day draws a good crowd

Mud was a big attraction at the Birthday Bash and
Mud Day.

Despite occasional rain drizzles, the Georgeson Birthday Bash and Mud Day attracted than 300 visitors Sunday to the Georgeson Botanical Garden.

People enjoyed the music, garden walks, birthday cake and watching kids cavort in the mud pit. Activities for young visitors included face painting, sculpting with clay, creating bubbles and mud pies, painting with dirt, walking the shrub maze and handling composting worms. Kids especially favored the mud holes. A lengthy line formed for the opportunity to slide on plastic and splash into a watery mud pit.

A young girl, waiting for her turn, said, expectantly: “It’s gross. I know it’s going to be gross.”

Kids in an adjacent mud hole flung mud on each other and created mud pies.

Admiring visitors snapped photos of the garden’s flowers, including multiple varieties of peonies, which are beginning to bloom.

The event celebrates summer in the garden and the 168th birthday of Charles Georgeson, an agronomist who founded experiment stations in Alaska.

Mud Day is sponsored by the garden, the Georgeson Botanical Garden Society and the UAF School of Natural Resources and Extension. The garden is open through Labor Day weekend, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. Admission is $5. Tours begin Fridays at 2 p.m. and meet at the entrance kiosk.

A young artist shows off the artwork he created on
a paint wheel.

Face painting artistry at work.