Category: nature

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This is another one of the endless ways to zoom and crop a coneflower in various stages of maturity. Love the colors and shapes.

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Although the 7-day nature photo challenge is over, I continue to take backyard flower and plant photos. This time an insect photo-bombed a coneflower. I am not really a bug-lover, but look at those antennae—they’re like antlers! Gotta love that. In my brief search I didn’t find out what type of beetle this is, but it’s very interesting!

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This is a close-up of a purple Calibrachoa (baby petunia) that turned out to be blurred (due to wind). But the colors were so wonderful, so I zoomed in anyway and cropped to accentuate the glowy blur of colors.

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This is the side of one pink Calibrachoa bloom. Think baby petunias, which is what I call them. When I zoomed in I was more interested in the contrast between the bright pink and the dark background than the actual bloom itself.

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Thanks to my facebook flower friends, I know now what this flower is: a balloon flower. I love the color and form of the balloon bud. In cropping the photo, I liked the shapes, colors, and positioning of these buds. Since I took the photo, the purple one has opened up. Beautiful.

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One more coneflower that’s getting close to opening. I had a sense of the coneflower singing outward in this one. What do you see?

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It seems I never tire of coneflower close-ups.

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Another milkweed flower photo, but these buds haven’t quite opened. Still intriguing! A milkweed bud bouquet.

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Prompted by a facebook 7-day “nature photo” challenge (thanks, Janice), this is the first of seven photos I took in our backyard today. I know I should probably take a photo each of seven days, but that’s not happening (at least I can’t count on it happening). But in addition to fulfilling the nature photo challenge, I now have seven daily janes in a row! Haven’t done that in awhile.

We have one milkweed plant in back (courtesy of the previous owner, I imagine—or the wind). Having seen milkweed almost exclusively (as far as I knew, anyway) in autumn when the signature pods are present, I was delighted to see these blooms forming then opening.

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I took this photo of a not-quite-open peony before the wind and hail and rain storms of the past few days. It’s nice to see a peony looking so fresh and new again.