And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden (and celebrating my fourth blogoversary)

It's that time of year again when the Frederick Meijer Garden has its "Butterflies are Blooming" program. The butterflies aren't easy to photograph so I usually see it as a chance to take pictures of flowers. This year was a nice surprise for me in that I got the best butterfly pictures I ever have. Here is the entire set.

This was over by the coat room.


So was this.


We have one that's similar to this. It's really dangerous. Those spikes can puncture skin very easily.


This is one of the pitcher plants. It thought it was cool.


This is just the beginning of the many orchids.




They also have some springtime plants.






I liked this fountain.


This devil's tongue plant was really interesting.


They're huge.




If you look at this on Flickr in the large size you can see the detail.


More orchids.


This one has a face.






The birds are constantly on the move, so the picture's slightly blurred.


If you look at this one in the large size you can see the brightly colored birds at the feeding dish. One of these days I'm going to get a camera that does better with zoom.


Another butterfly that has good detail.


This one worked fairly well, too.


Golden shrimp plant to the left in this one.


This is the very best butterfly picture I've ever taken. I'm proud of this one.


I just realized, as I looked at the date on this post, that this is my fourth blogoversary. How appropriate that I'd be posting pictures of flowers.

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.

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.