Flowers!

You know I can't pass up a botanical garden, especially if it's Smithsonian. Ichabod loves plants as much as I do so of course we visited. Here's the entire set of pictures. I'm going to have trouble deciding which ones to post here. I want to show them all, of course.

They had a traveling exhibition of globes. The theme was ecology.

This one had to do with proper roofing materials.


This one was just made of all kinds of stuff. If you click on it you can check out the larger version and the things are easier to see.


I liked this one, too.


And now I'll try to load too many flower pictures here.




This one's kinda hard to make out. It's easier to see in the large size.


This was out of focus, but I like the flower too much to delete it.












They had these metal ones, too. They were cool, but weird.




And, of course, an orchid.

More flower pictures?

Doesn't Squirl ever run out of flower pictures? Doesn't she ever get tired of posting flower pictures? When did she start talking in third person???

Anyway, I've been busy and not posting very often. But, I'll say that gardening is one of my excuses. And, also, an excuse to put up a few more pictures.

I love this orange begonia. The color is really hard to capture, but I had to try anyway.


This is the first time I've had straw flowers. I should really cut some and bring them in before they go to seed. I'd like to see how long they really stay after cutting. Here we go with the orange again. :-)


And here's one of my new rose bushes. Ichabod really likes it as he's more used to single color roses.

Lilies and more

My stargazer lilies are at their peak. I tried getting some pictures yesterday morning but the sun was too bright. As the sun got lower, the garage was shading them. It seems kind of fitting that the pictures turned out dark since they're called stargazers.

Here are some of the pictures I took. The rest are added to my 2008 Garden set.

The lilies






The cleomes




And one of the begonia

My Garden

I just realized I hadn't taken any pictures of my yard since early June when the peonies where blooming. Since the gardens have definitely changed since that time I figured I'd better get out there with my camera.

Here's a slideshow of the entire shoot.

As always, if you want to see better detail just click on the picture and choose All Sizes.

This is a long shot of the backyard.


And some shots going around the backyard, starting with the fence garden.








This is the back garden of the back yard.






This is the garage side garden.








And here are the front gardens.




There's still some more planting to do. And some of the flowers, especially the fuschia and the impatiens will do more filling out. But I feel better now that I've documented the gardens to this point.

Tiptoe through the...

All of the tulips in my yard are done now. I've been procrastinating posting the pictures because I thought I hadn't uploaded them to Flickr yet. Pretty lame excuse, I know. Even more lame because, duh, I did have them uploaded. So here are some of them that I'd like to share.

This was at the beginning of the tulips in my yard.


The sun was a bit bright here.




I love the colors in this one.




These were hard to photograph because they were almost a black color.




You're getting three pictures of the inside of this color tulip. I couldn't believe how delicate it was.


Also because I caught this little guy at work. He looks cool in the large size.


Too much paparazzi for him. He's leaving.