Bright and Bold

A few more favorites from the Botanic Gardens:

This one reminds me of a Mardi Gras headdress - no idea what the plant was though.

Up Close and Personal: Daffodils

I love daffodils in the springtime - so bright and cheery. So when I picked up a bunch at Whole Foods, of course I had to get out my macro lens and share them with you all!

Orchids and Butterflies

One of my favorites of the Smithsonians is the Museum of Natural History, where boyfriend and I took a ramble a few weeks ago. Most of the museum is full of dead things, but there are few living items as well. I think it's a yearly thing, but they occasionally have an orchid exhibit, which is really amazing. Boyfriend and I got took some time to smell the orchids and learn a bit, as we wanted to head out to an orchid store in the boonies of Virginia to stock up on orchids for terrariums. Al's Orchid Greenhouse is amazing, and Al is quite the character himself. He went through the greenhouse with us and told us about every orchid that could possibly be used in a terrarium, and we came home with a nice selection.

Another exhibit at the museum that I like (which I think is a permanent exhibit) is the Orkin Insect Exhibit. I'm not sure how I feel about Orkin sponsoring it, but it's pretty neat. I liked the display window full of moth and butterfly chrysalises. I was able to sit there and watch one hatch.

I'm blue da ba dee da ba die...

I haven't taken advantage of the fact that I live in a city full of free museums and great culturalness in a while, so boyfriend and I went to the Museum of Natural History and the National Botanic Gardens a few weeks ago. I haven't gotten a chance to go through all my photos yet, but here are some lovelies from the Gardens.

What's the Story, Morning Glory?

A Different View

I haven't been playing with my fisheye lens nearly as much lately, and looking through these pictures reminds me I have to get it out more often.

Plants to the Second Power

Here are a few more of my favorites from my last visit to the U.S. Botanic Gardens.

These first two are a plant called the Rattlesnake Master. You have to respect a plant with a name like that.




Stoke's Aster

I've fallen a bit behind, but I plan on putting up some new photos to ViewFound Photography, so stay tuned!

Off to the Woods!

In a couple of hours I will be on my way off to the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, to go spend the weekend at boyfriend's cabin. This will be the second weekend in a row that I get to spend time in nature, which is particularly exciting, seeing as how I am a complete city person sans car. Last weekend we went hiking in the Shenandoah with friends and it was so amazingly beautiful. I also got to try out slow shutter speeds to get the beautiful flowing water look, even though it involved crawling around on dirty rocks and taking hundreds of pictures to get one just right. :)

Barking up the Right Tree

I'm in a botanical mood this morning....

On The Fence

Laura gets in shape

So I've been a loser lately and haven't really posted anything or accomplished anything besides work the past week or so, aside from my brief stint into the athletic world this weekend and last. I am on the Texas Exes softball team, but hadn't made it to a game yet because we had 5 rain-outs and 2 actual games. We had a double header on Saturday that I actually could make it to, so that was fun. It's been so long since I've been able to talk anyone into playing my version of "baseball" with me, so it was good. Hmm....bushwoman is coming to visit me this weekend, maybe I'll get her to pitch for me. :) Anyways, they also needed girls for their soccer game on Sunday, so now I've also joined that team as well. I was a little nervous to play with UT people, as they can be pretty intense about their sports, but luckily the accepted my suckiness. Fun times.

Last weekend, boyfriend and I took a lovely bike ride up in Prince George's County, MD, on the Sligo Creek trails, just off the West Hyattsville Metro station....which I highly recommend. The trails are really nice, well-paved with pretty scenery, and there was almost no one else on them on a Sunday afternoon. Anyways, so the plan was to take the metro to West Hyattsville and ride 11 miles up to the Brookside Garden and then back. After leaving the metro station, we struck off to try and find the trails and found them after only a little bit of meandering. We struck off, and went four miles before we finally found a map, and discovered that we had gone in the wrong direction. I really wanted to go to the garden, and I had lugged my big camera out and everything, so we decided to just turn around and make it a 30 mile ride instead of 22 miles. After we made it back to the metro station, we discovered a handy little trail entrance like 10 feet from the metro station - you live, you learn. So anyways, after a nice long bike ride through beautiful parks and woods on a sunny day, we get to the Wheaton Regional Park, which is where Brookside Gardens is. With less than a mile to go, boyfriend wipes out on the trail, because he has a roadbike and the trail was really slick. Awesome. Luckily, both him and his bike were fine, just a bit scraped up. We got up to the garden, but my butt was really sore, because despite padded bike shorts, riding 20 miles isn't nice, boyfriend was in pain from his spill, not to mention as soon as we entered the garden he started have massive allergies. So we sat on a bench for a while while he sneezed away, I took a few pictures with my phone because I wanted a new background on my phone, and didn't even get out the big camera. Seeing as how neither of us were in shape to ride another 11 miles back to the metro station, we broke out the google maps and figured out another metro station was only about a mile away, so we rode there and then headed home.

Fire Bush

I have no idea what this bush is, but I'm in love.

And yet another round of succulents...

While my camera has some cool settings, it is still just a point-and-shoot. Seeing as how I had stolen boyfriend's camera for the day, which is infinitely many times better, and I had already taken all the pictures I could of the Christmas exhibits at the Botanical Gardens, I wandered over to my favorite room, the succulents. They never fail to amuse me, no matter how many times I visit.

Playing with Color

When I first got my camera I liked to play with all the cool little settings. Apparently the novelty has now worn off and I no longer do such things, but some of them are quite cool. Like the color accent feature, for example.

Ginkgo-Lined D.C., Capital of the U.S., and Now P.U.

The title of this post was blantantly copied and pasted from the Washington Post. Why try to reinvent the wheel?

So a while ago, I posted about my love/hate relationship with ginkgo trees. Granted, it's a bit more on the hate side, this time of year. It turns out I'm not alone. I was reading the paper on Sunday, and this Washington Post article explains a bit why things seem a bit worse this year.
Not surprisingly, most DC residents share my sentiments about the fruit of the ginkgo tree, and so the District decided to inject all the female trees with an anti-fruit serum, but it didn't work, and there was a bumper crop of ginkgo fruit. Awesome. Some of the quotes in the article are priceless. I think my personal favorite is in reference to the chemical that makes the smell (also found in rancid butter):

"I'm sure there was some purpose it served" in some long-ago Asian forest, said Earl Eutsler, an arborist with the D.C. Urban Forestry Administration. "Now, it just makes people angry."

Take a Bite Out of Crime

Yes, I know, this has nothing to do with teeth or crime, but the spiky things kinda remind me of teeth, so give me a little poetic license.