Today's Flowers and Weekend Flowers: Home and Office

 My first rose of sharon of the season (bush type of hibiscus) are blooming.

The yellow roses below are blooming at my office.

I used to have a similar yellow rose bush at home but it died after many years of beautiful blooms.

Below is a mix of pansies at my office.

One more office flowers shot below.

The rest of the shots are ones I took at home.

I love the way rudbeckia look when they first form.

It looks like the petals are hugging the center.

More and more of my coneflowers (echinacea) are blooming.

Click for Today's Flowers and click for Weekend Flowers.

Photohunters: With what do you like to travel and citrus

To answer the question with what do you like to travel, I like to travel with a camera. To combine that theme with the citrus theme, I found a shot I took in Key West Florida with my first digital camera in 2002. I thought it was appropriate since FL has a lot of citrus growers. The quality of the shot is poor since my first digital camera was cheap and not very good but it's the only way I could think of combining the themes.

Click for the what you like to take when you travel photohunters and click here for the citrus photohunters.

Nature Notes: late June

Some of my coneflowers (echinacea) are starting to form flowers.

There are hundreds of bees (not sure what kind of bee the one below is) that are busy on my porcelain vine (Ampelopsis brevipenduculata).

The American Robin was shaking off the water so hard that it looked like she had hair covering her eyes.

The blackberry vines are beginning to form berries. They are growing through the porcelain vine so most of the visible leaves are from the porcelain vine.

There are hundreds of bumblebees mixed in with the smaller bees.

The bumblebees flit around amongst the different flowers.

 

I have a lot of brown thrashers in my yard.

The mourning dove pair were sharing a bird bath.

The juvenile cardinal and american robin were sure about sharing.

The carolina wren finally stayed still long enough for a photo.

There are a bunch of juvenile cardinals this year.

There were eight or so on my deck at the same time.

I like how soft their feathers look after a bath.

I like the dusky beaks on the juvenile females.

I finally managed to get some shots when the bird baths were relatively clean.

I love the way cardinals tilt their heads.

Click for the home of nature notes.

Today's Flowers and Weekend Flowers: Later part of June

I need to pull up the saplings that are surrounding my yarrow but I decided to take a picture first in case weeding around it damages the flowers.

The rudbeckia or black-eyed-susan as we call it below is growing in a pot on my deck.

The petunias below are growing in a pot in front of an office building.

 

I zoomed in on the magnolia bloom high up in a tree.

The gardenia below is much smaller than the magnolia blossom but they look similar in these shots.

I like the way mimosa blooms look like pin cushions.

The mimosa trees in my yard are all volunteers.

The coriopsis is getting a little raggedy looking.

I think the next gardenia blossom looks like it has rabbit ears.

Last is one more mimosa shot.

Click for Today's Flowers and click for Weekend Flowers.

Photohunters: Daydream Sculptures

I have a tendency to daydream when I'm walking.

I decided to combine the two theme by showing you sculptures at the NC Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill.

I was daydreaming while walking through the garden taking pictures of the sculpture.

Since these shots are from a number of different walks and years I can't tell you exactly what I was daydreaming about.

Even if I could remember, I would probably not want to write about my daydreams anyway.

The botanical garden has a lot of different sections to show the different habitats in North Carolina.

Many of the sculptures are nestled in the wild parts of the garden.

That's the reason these shots don't include many of the flower beds and other cultivated plants that are in the garden.

The bee sculptures are almost scary enough to turn a daydream into a horror movie.

The little boy in the bottom corner below almost looks like he's running away from the winged sculpture.

Click here for the sculptures photohunt and here for the daydream photohunt.