Zooming – September 2016

I already did a zooming post earlier this month focused totally on insects --- but there have been so many other good shots that I couldn’t resist another for this month with more than insects in the mix. I am getting a new camera soon so this might be the last set of images with the 30x in optics and digital up to 120x. Let’s start with some plants: crabapples against a clear blue sky. Most of the leaves have already fallen from the tree but I looked around to find some fruit with a leaf nearby.

A flower with its petals still in tubes. Soon they would flatten into more normal looking petals.

A cloud of pink flowers.

Lots of pollen.

Milkweed seeds on the verge of blowing away.

The long central stalk of the hibiscus flower.

And a mushroom that was greenish underneath.

Back to some animals…..this chipmunk had very full cheek pouches. It was probably collecting food to be stored away for winter.

A skipper sunning itself among the dew drops on a large flower.

A bee so focused on the flower that it doesn’t notice my son-in-law’s camera trying to get a close shot (upper left corner). I prefer using the zoom!

A molting bird…maybe a grackle?

A dragonfly.

Longwood Gardens – December 2015 (Part II)

The rest of Longwood Gardens was – as usual – very beautiful. I’ve selected some themes for this post. The first grouping is some ‘artsy’ attempts inside the conservatory: a bamboo forest,

A bent calla lily and

A simple water feature.

The next group are plants I saw growing outdoors in Hawaii; they only survive the winter in conservatories in Pennsylvannia: a bird of paradise and

A hibiscus.

There were also some landscapes I enjoyed: in the conservatory,

A treehouse at the forest’s edge across a grassy lawn,

Around the model trains and

One of my favorite rooms in the conservatory (there is a water feature that gently flows through the central plantings…which change seasonally).

Usually I take a lot of close ups of the orchids. This time I took the room itself. I’d never quite noticed the spirals behind the pots before.

There was a tiered fountain that had been repurposed as infrastructure for succulents and small aloes. I like the muted colors and shapes.

The last grouping is cycad textures. There were several different kinds in the Longwood Conservatory and I focused on the non-leaf structures.