Day 419

Today, we went to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens to see the plants, and the new butterfly house.

Marigolds

Camellia

Hydrangea

Hydrangea

Devil's Tongue

These flowers have grown between an emergency exit gate. They were covered in ants.

Water Lily

Hydrangea

Monarch butterfly

Monarch butterflies

Day 404 - Easter

Today was Easter, so we went to my parents' house for lunch. While Alex was hunting for eggs, I took photos in the back yard.

Day 386

This morning, there was frost on the cars and plants.

Day 204

Today I noticed more plants blooming. I've been documenting these particular plants since they were purple stalks sprouting from the ground.

Day 131

There were some new plants that formed recently.

This tree (maybe overgrown bush) has these large pink flowers.

This bush has yellow flowers. They are wet due to recent rain.

I've seen these plants in various sizes. This one was about the size of a plate.

This is the tree tops, taken with the panoramic setting.

This is a view of the trees, moving the camera vertical. The trees at the top are on the other side of the parking lot, from the ones at the bottom.

Day 76

As I had hoped, today there is rain. As I was walking Alex to the bus stop, I noticed that there were lots of puddles. Later, I ventured out into the very muddy backyard to take photos of the puddles. To my delight, they were very pretty in unexpected ways.

This one had the clearest reflection of the trees above.

The rain started pouring faster. Droplet patterns appeared on the surface of the puddles.

A runoff stream has formed beside the Holly tree. There are variations of sediment color in the stream. The reflection of the sky is rippled in the flow of the sedimentary stream.

Day 72

I went over to my parents' house to drop off Alex for a sleep over and to have dinner. Before dinner, I went outside to take photos.

This is the early sunset from their back porch.

I went to throw something away and noticed all the acorns covering this part of the driveway. There had to be thousands of them. Squirrels don't go hungry in their yard.

Mom grew moss along the slate path to their house. It's really soft and is growing over some of the slate. This small leaf was laying on the ground moss.

Their garden reminds me of the beach. They have all these yellow leafed beachy plants.

Day 71

Today, I headed to Shockoe Bottom (in the city, where most of the bars and clubs are) to deliver something. While I was walking back to my car, I decided to talk some photos.

I love seeing plants growing through man-made objects. In this case, the plants are growing through the foundation of a building.

These are the same kind of plants, but these are growing through the sidewalk.

The trees lining 18th street were gnarly with new growth.

These are the roots of one of the trees. I loved how these looked among the rocks from the street and glass from broken bottles...ah the bar district...

When I got home, a hawk landed in a near by tree. Sorry for the blurry photo. I went outside to try to take a better photo, but it flew away. Hopefully the hawks will stay in our neighborhood and I can take better photos.

Day 58

After a baby shower in the city for a friend, I took some photos while walking towards my car. I noticed these little plants growing from this section of wall for yard. There were many different kinds. Again, it's amazing what I notice now, because I'm looking for it.

I liked this star shaped or flower shaped one.

There were many clusters of moss along this section of wall. It's very delicate, intricate and pretty.

I noticed more little "hairs" on this plant. I looked up info on hairs of plants, so I could learn a bit about what I saw in different plants.

The buds on this kind tree (there was a line of this kind of tree) are bulbous and a whitish grey color. I liked the shape of the buds with the twisting branches.

Day 57

Today is about the little things. The things we miss if we aren't close up to it, looking for them.

This is a downy feather left by one our wild bird neighbors.

I like the veining in this leaf. One odd thing I noticed, is little hairs at the ends of some leaves of different varieties. Some even had little hairs covering the leaf. Very odd, but these are the sort of things you notice when you look closely at nature.

I'm not sure what kind of nut this is, but I like the cracks in it. There are nut shell bits all over the ground in this area. We have lots of squirrels and chipmunks. This is probably their doing.

This is a creeping vine that is along large portions of the yards.

Day 48

Today, while we were driving to Jason's Deli for lunch, I noticed the lake near by was partially frozen and had geese around it/in it. After lunch, I went over to take photos while Alex finished up her ice cream with John. I took photos of the ice, but I should have looked closer before taking photos. If you haven't been around geese before, well there is a lot of poo. So much poo, that there was poo on the ice. The below photos don't include those poo filled ruined photos. Though this blog is about photographing nature and poo is natural, it's not pretty and you don't need to see that in a photo. No amount of blurring in photoshop could have removed it and left recognizable ice. Gross. Ok, on to photos not about poo...

This is Fountain Grass an edge of the lake. In the background you can see the ice and water. The unfrozen part is due to the fountain which you can sort of see on the right middle area. Geese are opposite. This water has to be really cold. Apparently geese don't mind.

Here are some of the smarter geese that aren't swimming in the freezing water.

This is a seagull on the ice. Since we don't live near the sea/ocean (it's about 1.5 hrs away driving), we call them trashgulls as they tend to hang out in parking lots and land fills. The footprints in the snow are from the geese...I think. They were smaller than human feet.

Brown plant. I'm not sure what type.

Back at the house, I decided that the rock salt was photo worthy. It's natural, though not naturally occurring here. It's all over the paths and stair due to the last recent snow. It's tinted the path and snow a pink color. I tried to take photos of the tinted snow, but they didn't come out clear. I will try again another day, before the snow all melts.