Plants

Orchids part 1 ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 2 Comments

These photos were taken at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s 2017 orchid show. I’ve carried various cameras to four or five of these shows, but this is the first time I felt pleased with more than a small handful of shots. It’s also the first time I was patient enough to photograph the identification labels, so I now can actually name what I took. Just call me a slow learner.

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Paphiopedilum Black Thorpe. This is the orchid whose sexual organs were featured in yesterday’s post.

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Cattleya Los Gatos

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Bulbophyllum cumingii

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Phalaenopsis Hampshire Clouds

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Aliceara Purple Passion

Naughty bits ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 3 Comments
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Paphiopedilum Black Thorpe

Flowers are pure sex out in the open, and that’s especially true of orchids, which are exquisitely adapted for pollination. The sheer sexuality of orchids has been commented upon so often that it is a cliché—but it’s a beautiful one. This is the first time I’ve taken a photograph that amounts to flower pornography. I’ll show the entire flower, along with a number of other orchid species, in my next post. Olympus OM-D EM10 II, 30 mm macro.

Pond eddy ~

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Taken at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s 2017 orchid show. Olympus OM-D EM10 II with 30 mm macro lens (60 equivalent). I recently acquired this 4:3 mirror-less camera (which somehow stands up under the burden of that absurd series of letters and numbers), and so far I absolutely love it. It’s lightweight and small, which is a boon for my tendinitis-weakened wrists, but it seems to perform as well as my Pentax K-50. Best of all, you can shoot just by touching the LCD screen where you want the sharpest focus to be. No, Olympus didn’t pay me to praise this camera. What a shame! Next up: Orchids! Lots of ’em.

My favorite summer plants ~

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This is the first year I’ve ever planted flowers in my planter or in pots on my deck. Some of them actually lived.

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The lovely balloon flower (so named for the balloon-like buds; see lower left).

 

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The indefatigable torenia, which keeps on forgiving me for not watering it frequently enough. All the other potted plants I had on my deck eventually gave up the ghost or were hopelessly battered by thunderstorms.

 

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The volunteer calibrachoa, which surreptitiously migrated to my planter from the hanging basket I briefly had on my front porch two or three months ago.

 

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Audrey the giant hosta. Small animals disappear in her clutches and are never seen again. I planted the other flowers here, but I inherited Audrey with the house.

Another green world no. 2 ~

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This ethereal vine, which looks like some sort of fairy fern, is growing in profusion outside of our public library. Anyone know what it is?

iPhone photo. “Another green world” is from Brian Eno’s classic album of that name. It just occurred to me that he might have borrowed that title from a literary work, but a quick Google search isn’t turning up anything.