Tag Archives: flower

Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden in Federal Way

Down in Federal Way, there is a rhododendron garden. It is next to the bonsai garden I have posted about previously but we hadn’t visited it before. We took a trip down when the rhododendrons should have been getting into bloom. The garden is a strange location since it is tucked in between two freeways. While you are walking around lots of lovely greenery, you can’t escape the rumble of traffic nearby.

Unlike some gardens that have a very manicured feel to them, this feels a lot more organic in the layout. I am sure there is a lot of planning that went in to the design but it feels like it is a natural growth. Supposedly, it has the largest collection of rhododendrons in the world. Not sure who verifies such things but it was certainly large.

It isn’t just rhododendrons, though. Lots of other plants are scattered around the place. They have a meadow that has blue poppies in it. They are lovely looking flowers if a little fragile looking. There is a glasshouse in the middle of the garden and we took a wander around in there but, with the sun out, it was pretty hot and humid in there so we didn’t spend too long.

The blooms were not extensive when we visited so it didn’t have the same feel as we got on our first visit to Meerkerk, for example. However, as a garden with a wide variety of plants and color, it was certainly a great place to wander about and I suspect we will be back there in the future.

Meerkerk a Little Early This Time

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A couple of years ago we made a visit to Meerkerk Gardens on Whidbey Island to see the rhododendrons in bloom. We decided a return trip was in order. We were possibly a week later than our previous trip but were optimistic. The gardens were open even with the restrictions in place at that time but we did have to pay online because there weren’t any staff at the entrance.

We had a nice time wandering around. There were some of the plants in bloom and the colors were very nice. However, it appears that things are blooming a bit later this year. Presumably the spring didn’t warm up as fast. Plenty of the trees had yet to bloom. I suspect a week or two later might have resulted in a lot more color. Even so, it was still a very pretty place to walk around.

We hadn’t previously explored as much of the garden as is available. There is a woodland trail that goes around the back and over some of the steeper areas and we went through all of this. With so few people there – we did get there early – we were not encountering many other visitors. I wonder whether it would have been a lot busier a couple of weeks later as the flowers really came into their own.

Foxgloves and Other Wildflowers

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Just around the corner from our street is a wilder section of the road which currently has a lot of Foxgloves in bloom. I wandered around with camera in hand to take some photos. The bees were busy doing there thing but much patience was required because, whichever flower I decided to focus on, the bees concluded another one was what they wanted. I spent a lot of time only for them to choose the flowers either side of mine!

The bees were not only interested in the foxgloves. One particularly large looking bee was really going to town on another flower and I wondered whether he had had so much that he might not be able to get airborne again. I guess rolling off the edge of the flower gained him so airspeed – enough to stagger back into the air!

Spider Hiding Out

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My effort at shooting macro images of bees in our front yard (this post) also yielded a surprised. While I was waiting on a flower for the bee to come to me, I noticed the flower already had a resident. A little white spider was hanging out in there. I am not sure what its intended prey was. It seemed a bit small to take on a bee but I have no idea if that could happen. Maybe it wanted something smaller. I got a couple of shots of it that interested me. The prime shots show its “face” in detail. Macro shots have a very shallow depth of field so I missed with plenty of shots but one or two had the end of the legs in focus. The detail of the hairs on the legs was so cool so I include that too even if it looks like I missed focus on the shot (which obviously I did!).

Bees at Work

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The Puget Sound area is currently abloom. Everywhere you look there are flowers. It is quite beautiful. We haven’t seen too many hummingbirds on our feeder recently and it’s not hard to see why when they have so many places to feed right now. We have some blooms in our front yard too and this means the bees are visiting. I decided to try and use the macro lens to get some shots of them. My lens is a Tokina unit. I bought it for the negative scanning process for which it worked well. However, the focusing drive is not fantastic and it hunts a bit when I use it for things other than manual mode. However, it is still worth a shot. Here are a couple of bee shots from the yard. I can’t go anywhere so I may as well shoot at home!

Busy Bees

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The rhododendrons at Meerkerk Gardens weren’t only attracting the people to visit. It was awash with bees. The flowers were heaven for these insects and they were on so many of the plants. The sound of buzzing was a constant accompaniment. It was also interesting to see the different types of bee. Some plants had large, fuzzy bees while others had a thinner and shinier species. Clearly, the bees are very specific about which plant is their favorite.

Meerkerk Gardens

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Spring is a good time for rhododendrons and there are a number of gardens known for their flowering in the Seattle area. We decided to take a trip to Whidbey Island to visit Meerkerk Gardens. I hadn’t heard of it before but Nancy had done some research so we gave it a go. While it was not in full bloom – peak blooming was one to two weeks away – it still was a gorgeous sight.

You can get blasé about the beauty of some places as each next view is as pretty as the preceding one and you have to remind yourself that this is not normal. It is a peak of color and shape that doesn’t last long and has to be appreciated while it is there. I lack the vision to come up with a good way of conveying just how pretty it is but I will have to make do with sharing some of the shots I took while strolling around.

A Stinking Rarity

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Some plants bloom frequently. Others bloom once a year. What is slightly more unusual is a plant that only blooms once every 7-10 years. The Titan Arum is one such plant and an example lives in the Amazon Spheres in Seattle. Purely by coincidence, we happened to visit the Spheres when it was blooming. We had actually missed the peak opening by a day and it was starting to close up again. It had also had a hole cut into the side to allow pollination artificially. But this was a small price to pay for seeing something so unusual.

One feature the plant is known for is a smell of rotting flesh when it is blooming. This is supposed to attract insects that then assist with pollination. There was a bit of an odor but, to be honest, I wasn’t conscious of it being too bad. Maybe there is a peak period of stinkiness and we missed it or maybe the story has been slightly overblown. Either way, it was very lucky that we happened to be there during the blooming process and now we might have to wait a few years before it happens again.

Dahlia Collection

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The Rose Garden in Point Defiance Park was a feature but there weren’t only roses. They also had a dahlia section. Nancy loves dahlias so we checked this out. The variety of these blooms was almost as good as it was for the roses!

Varieties of Tulip Shape

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I thought tulips came in one shape. I was wrong. Walking around the gardens at RoozenGaarde in Mt Vernon, I got to see so many varieties of tulip and I was amazed at the different shapes and sizes. Color varieties was something I expected but I didn’t realize just how large some blooms were and I was even more surprised at some plants that, had I not been told that they were tulips, I would never have known. Fringing of the petals, curvatures that were totally different to the norm and all sorts of variations in between were eye opening. I guess tulips are a complex subject!