I kept seeing the phrase, towering spike of flowers used. They have some smaller perennial species as well that still reaches 4-5 foot. I agree the flowers are nice but the foliage is spectacular.
I’m thinking of getting vectorworks soon to do landscape design on. They are supposed to have around 15k plant species on it with 1,5 and 10 year growth stages along with seasonal changes. I’m bad at visualizing things without it being in front of me.
I keep seeing lots of amazing gardens in California. Sometime in probably 2022 I will take i10 along the south and hit i5 and go up the west coast and make it a three week trip. Then fly back. Want to visit cannon beach and the Portland japanese garden again. I remember when driving through before on the 5 right before the bridge to SF I saw some crazy beautiful front yard gardens. Seen some palm that was about 60 foot with some kind of vine climbing almost to the top.
Then I need to show you some older photos. I did experiment with some other smaller ones and some of their foliage was even finer. This one had a white flower and was about 3 feet tall. I like the way it caught the light.
The texture/color harmony with this Echeveria ‘Doris Taylor’ is one of my favorite photos. They both have those dense fuzzy hairs to reflect light.
It was so tiny. About the size of a blueberry. I think because of spending so much time looking at plants and looking for buds, falls on them from wasps and so on that things pop out at me while hiking.
I’m disappointed I could not catch neither of the three water snakes I seen today. Catching a snake on land is hard enough. Catching a snake from the front, while it’s in the water and able to dive down and pop up 10 feet away in a few seconds on the other side of a six foot creek is harder than I can imagine. Though after running and jumping over the creek to the other side by the 6th time I just gave up.
I was about to strip down to my boxers and get in the water but too many people around and the water is dark and I don’t want to set on any of the sunken limbs and stuff. So they got away.
Wanted to catch one so I could look at it’s belly to help ID it. Especially now that I know there was three subspecies and at least a few hybrids and the main way to tell them apart is stomach scale patterns.
The first two pictures is off the Giant Leopard Moth , and it’s a rarer morph with completely filled in black rings.
The third picture is of a White Banded Spider that blended in with a dewberry ( same genus as blackberries ) and caught a small insect.
The last picture is of the Mournful Thyris moth.
We are in Kentucky. Land between the Lakes,camping and admiring the redbuds and dogwoods also. Will get to my phone and post a dogwood pic. Four petals form the cross, center the crown of thorns, petals with nail piercings
That makes me mildly nostalgic. We had dogwood trees in front of our house in Philadelphia when I was growing up (not that I’ve necessarily grown up anywhere ). And they’re beautiful landscaping wherever they are. Winters are too cold in Nebraska for them, I guess, and I haven’t been back east in the spring forever.
That makes me somewhat nostalgic, too. My parents and I camped in the Smokies a few times when I was the youngest still at home.
A somewhat amusing story… At one campground in the park, after getting our tent and site set up one warm early afternoon, we asked if there was someplace to swim. We thought the answer was “Down at the Y”, as in “YMCA”. It took us a while, but we finally discovered that the real answer was “Down at the Wye.”
The Townsend Wye is a large fairly shallow and slowly rotating pool where two mountain creeks meet, with some tame whitewater in the conjoined stream exiting. You could pick the temperature where you were most comfortable in the ‘mixing bowl’ as it varied with exposure to the sun and the respective creeks. I remember ‘cliff diving’ from a good height:
The last time I saw it, though, was when my boys were in junior high or high school some three decades ago, and swimming and diving were both prohibited:
Saw these yesterday while riding my bike. I second guessed myself with the water snake. Not sure how to explain it. I was initially 100% positive it’s a water snake because of the vertical chin markings and rounded pupils. But it’s the first time I was able to get so close to one on land and it really flattened its head and was upset over kids that was there first poking it with a stick. I stopped them and went to get it and it flattened its head more than I’ve seen and kept striking repeatedly because it was obviously irritated and scared. Finally it darted off between my legs and into the wetland along the trail. Nothing makes doubt pop up more than a angry striker lol.
Aw, you edited it. [He had the same photo twice. 
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