Pink Peony

I watch the Martha Stewart Show practically every day.  By the way, I hate her politics, but I love her style.  I'm interested in a lot of the things she is interested in.  Every spring, she starts talking about her peony garden.  It is huge with maybe a couple of hundred peony plants. 

Peonies, like lilacs, are a mystery to me, because we don't have them this far south.  I loved the lilacs when I lived in Iowa and Colorado.  They were magnificent.  There were big, tall, long hedges of lilacs--absolutely beautiful.  The smell was almost overwhelming.

Peonies have huge flowers and many of them are pink.  I decided to start naming my crochet projects.  So instead of calling this afghan a pink and green afghan, I am now calling it my peony baby pink afghan.

Silly huh?  Maybe.  But I am practicing my word pictures.  Some of you that know about peonies, got a picture in your mind didn't you?

Wildflowers

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity of visiting the Lady Bird Johnson Wilflower Center in Austin, Texas.  The center was founded to research different species of wildflowers and the propagation of them.  I have heard about the center for years but have never had the opportunity to visit. Since I was there for an event in the Wildflower Center Auditorium, free admission was given to all the participants.  Yay me.  I immediately started going through the garden and taking pictures as fast as I could.

It was a damp day after a rain storm, which is one of my favorite times to walk in a garden.  Just seeing the flowers alone  would be beautiful enough, but the garden is full of interesting sculptures as well.

We had lunch in the cafe.  I had the veggie wrap and hibiscus tea.  I also spent quite a bit of time in the gift shop.  It had everything from t-shirts to books to kitchen stuff.  Everything about wildflowers or with wildflowers painted on every object imagineable.  They had quite an extensive gardening book selection.  It is definitely a place that garden lovers should see at least once, especially in the spring during wildflower season. 

The first thing you see when you enter the garden is a cistern that collects rainwater with a huge dragonfly on it.

As you walk down the arched sidewalk, you see a couple of huge ants with heads the size of barrells..

Pictured are some of the beautiful flowers and some of my favorite sculptures. I took all the photos with my iphone.  I don't know what kind of photos I would have gotten if I had taken them with my other camera and had been able to compose the photos a little better.  It was an amazing place and a place that I want to visit again.