Category Archives: Greyhound

Bunny here at the keyboard writing about the adventure Küster and I had over the weekend.

You might remember that Küster had to go to have his eye exam done at the U of I vet school.  It was a quick appointment because he’s a very healthy dog and there was nothing wrong with him.  Mom and Dad knew it would be short, so they let me come along, and I figured it was just to be sure he had a model of civilized canine behavior to follow.  It turns out they had a surprise for us.

On the way home, we went by Allerton Park.  Mom was hoping that this time we’d catch it in full spring bloom, but that turned out not to be the case.  However, it was still beautiful.  They were setting up for a couple of weddings, but for the most part, we had the park to ourselves.  I thought it was a good time to begin Küster’s formal art appreciation training.  A pup has to start somewhere, and Allerton is a great place for that.  This wasn’t the first time I had been there, we went once in the late Summer and another time in late Spring, in case you thought the name of the place sounded familiar.  It’s one of the Seven Wonders of Illinois and rightly so.

Allerton Park was originally known as “The Farms” and was the private estate of Robert Henry Allerton.  It was the center of a 12,000 acre enterprise that Robert’s father, Samuel amassed in the late 1800′s.  Samuel Allerton became a very wealthy man and left his money to his son.  Robert was educated in Europe and his passion was art.  He traveled all over the world and was a great philanthropist, art collector and artist.  Robert Allerton saw the landscape as a canvas and he worked to create very unique artistic vistas on his estate.  He would buy precious artifacts and then bring them back to the estate and create beautiful gardens around them.  His life sounds very exciting and interesting, and if I were a human, I’d love to do a lot of the things he did.  It’s also said that he was a dog lover, and his dogs often roamed the estate with him.  At one time, he had fourteen dogs.  To this day, Allerton is still open to dogs because of that, as long as we are well mannered.

The first garden we visited was the Fu Dog Garden.  It has the Temple of the Golden Buddhas and a whole pack of Fu Dogs along the garden.  I thought this would be a good place for Küster to start appreciating art and truth be told, I thought he picked it up pretty quickly.  He didn’t even embarrass us by trying to pee on one of the Fu Dog pedestals.  This is one of the most popular sites for weddings in the park.

After we admired the Buddhas and the Fu Dogs, we moved on to the estate house. The other times we’ve been to Allerton, this has been a very pretty spot, but they didn’t have any flowers up there yet and the koi weren’t in their pond.  I’m sure that’s because it’s been so damp and wet.  Usually, we enjoy the grounds close to the house a lot.  It seems like the sort of house a Greyhound should be living in because the house itself seems like a work of art to me.

Since there wasn’t a lot to see up by the house, we wandered off up the path and made our way to the more formal gardens.  This is where we saw the Girl With A Scarf statue in the Brick Garden.  It was the last sculpture purchased for the garden in 1942.   Küster and Dad seemed a lot more impressed by this sculpture than some of the ones we admired earlier.  This garden is one that I think is particularly pretty in summer and fall.  After that, we wandered through the other formal gardens and admired the Avenue of the Chinese Musicians and the Sunken Garden, where another wedding was being prepared for.

These were all things I’ve seen and admired before, and I found them beautiful all over again.  To my surprise, however, we then left and went to find a trail that led to a sculpture we hadn’t seen before.  It’s called Death of the Last Centaur and it’s in a really beautiful spot.  We went past the pillars that Küster and I posed at in yesterday’s picture to get there.  On a funny note, Mom took a series of pictures of us there, to make sure she got one good one, and in most of the pictures, we were mirror images of each other.  It seems that Küster is a quick study in art appreciation and modeling.  As we got the the sculpture, we were a little breathless, not because of the walk, but because of the beautiful and perfect location of it.  We wondered how tough it must have been to move the sculpture into place when it was first brought in.

Our next stop was a visit to the Sun Singer.  I have to say, it’s much prettier there in the summer when there are riots of flowers blooming around the base, but it was still stunning in all the green of Spring.  My bet is that fall is the best time to see it, when all the leaves are in their Autumn glory.

After we left the Sun Singer, we decided to go out the recently opened South Entrance.  This is the first time we’ve visited and been able to use that entrance because it’s been closed for a long time.  Imagine our surprise when we saw that it was flanked by two statues with dogs at the entrance.  I did some research this weekend, but I couldn’t find out what they’re called, but there’s a man and a woman who are each posed with a hunting type of dog.  I will keep sniffing around until I find out.

I love that there are places in the world that you can visit and still find new and amazing things to love about them.  Allerton Park is one of those places.  Every time we go, we find something new that we hadn’t seen or admired before.  The best part is that there are still some parts that we haven’t seen, so we’ll be going back to see them one of these days, too.  I’m looking forward to what we’ll see the next time. We never know what we’ll find, but we know it will be beautiful.