Sometimes you just have to take the shot…. My wife and I visited Butchart Gardens as part of a tour booked through a cruise. It was one of those tours where you pile into a bus and they take you to a place for two or three hours, then you get back on the bus & return to your ship. The ship wants to leave on time, so the bus wants to leave on time, so you had better be on the bus… Not surprisingly I was trying to get as many shots as possible it our little window of opportunity. Just as the bus was about to leave without us, I saw this coy pond & decided I had to have the shot. My wife went on to the bus. (She went ahead, possably to insure she didn’t also miss the bus, but I like to think she was stalling the driver while I did my sequence of five exposures…) The good news is, I did not have to walk back to Texas, and I was able to capture a bit of the essence of these amazing gardens. I want my garden to look like this! Around 100 years ago Jennie Butchart, the wife of a Portland Cement magnate, decided to turn their exhausted quarry pit into a sunken garden. The original garden was completed in 1921 Today, over a million bedding plants a year are used throughout the gardens and over a million visitors visit Butchart Gardens annually. It’s well worth the trip.

In downtown Oklahoma City there is another wonderful botanical garden, the Crystal Bridge Tropical Conservatory & Myriad Botanical Gardens. The first image was taken inside the 220 foot long Crystal Bridge Conservatory that sits in the middle of the 17 acre botanical gardens. The Crystal Bridge is home to more than 1000 species of plants including everything from giant palms to hundreds of various orchids. On one end there is a Tropical Rain Forest Zone with various waterfalls & on the other is the Dry Tropical zone. The Conservatory includes plants from every continent except Antarctica. You can see the end of the Crystal Bridge in the second image taken from the gardens.  (If you like beautiful gardens, also check out my Butchart Garden blog.)

Crystal Bridge

Myriad Botanical Gardens