Willy-nilly Random Stuff: Spring? Maybe not...

1.  They say it’s the first day of spring here in the northern hemisphere.  While that may technically be true, it’s snowing here.  So what else is new, eh?  Well, to me that calls for a trip back to the Smith College greenhouse.  Sure it’s snowing out, but I’ve got my memories and my photos of those gorgeous flowers to hold me over until the local thing feels safe to pop its head out of the frozen ground.

2.  I love orchids!  They are such happy flowers.  Before I read the book The Orchid Thief:  A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean, I had no idea how crazy people could get over a flower.  But when I look at orchids, I can kind of understand it.  By the way, the book is a good read and the movie based (loosely) on the book Adaptation is worth a look, too, in my humble opinion.  I think I have a new favorite orchid and it’s this one:

3.  One of the things I truly love about spending time at a place like the Smith College greenhouse is seeing the grand variety in nature. Apples and oranges...succulents and orchids.  It's all good and it’s nice when people have taken the time to pull all these great elements together.  I appreciate it.

4.  But going from the relatively cool climate of the spring bulbs to the tropical area can cause the camera lens to fog up and the need for a bit of creativity in the photo editing department.

5.  No matter where your hallways lead, I hope you have a great Spring!

Linking up with A Rural Journal's Random Five Friday &

Around Roanoke's Willy-nilly Friday 5.  Thanks, kids!

Saturated in Spring Color…

I've been thinking that I deserve a little color after this winter.  So yesterday, I met my daughter Carrie in Northampton and we went to the Spring Bulb Show at Smith College.  It was a wonderful celebration of exuberant color.  When I started looking through and editing my photos, I decided I also deserved to be a little exuberant with the color so here’s my interpretation of what we saw yesterday.

Here's Carrie showing off her new hair color. The ends seems to match those nice orange flowers pretty well.

The theme of the show was Monet's Gardens.  Here's the man himself in the flesh...well, maybe in the cardboard.

Our snowmelt continues even though today was pretty cold.  It's only a matter of time.

A black and white night…

Like many people in the world today, I struggle with bouts of insomnia.  The magic hour for me is usually right around 4:00 a.m.  My eyes spring open and I lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling thinking, “WTF!  Not again.”  Normally, I just pick up whatever book I’m reading and read for a while.  Between five minutes and an hour later, I am back in dreamland.   But now and then, it just doesn’t work.  I can’t shut my mind off and I just have to get up.  That happened to me the other night.  I decided to get up and work on editing some photos…a practice I find very relaxing.  In the light of day, I checked out what I did the night before and here is what I saw:

I almost deleted it without a thought.  To me it looks like an illustration out of an Edgar Allen Poe story or something sinister like that.  But I guess, I was just in the mood for black and white in the middle of the night because I did a couple more, although these seem a little cheerier.

Personally, while I have nothing against black and white photography, I really like color.

  So here’s to a good night’s sleep!

Can you believe this??

I have to look at the calendar again and confirm that it is the middle of March.  Can it really be that we are expecting another snow storm this late in the game??   The answer is, yes, indeed, we are supposed to get 5 to 8 inches of snow tonight and a wintry mix tomorrow that will probably freeze it into an unworkable mess.  What can one do?  One certainly can’t fight Mother Nature.  Well, the only thing I can think of doing is to post a few more flower pics that I took in the Smith College greenhouse and sit back and ride it out.

So here you are.

It’s sprung!

Well, I guess spring hasn’t sprung officially yet but yesterday I got a really nice spring preview.  Carrie, my daughter, and I went to the Smith College Annual Bulb Show and we got enough spring there in one dose to take us through the next few days of winter.

 

Though we have been to the Smith College Annual Mum Show a couple of times in the fall, this was my first time at the spring show.  I must say, it was a wonderful color and fragrance blast after the gloomy winter we’ve had.

 

Of course, I took a lot of pictures.  But the ones I like best are the ones of the tulips and that is what I am posting today.  Here’s to spring!

Here we are enjoying the show.  This was taken in a gazing ball so we are a little distorted.  Well, at least in real life, Carrie's nose doesn't quite lean so far to the right.