The other morning before breakfast I just walked through my garden using my cell phone to snap a few happy sights. This slide show of 14 shots shows just one reason I like Costa Rica so much – year-around! 🙂
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I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. ~Georgia O’Keeffe
I’m not often in my garden or even out of my house at night, but with late watering tonight I saw how different it looks and tried to photograph it, though a photo can’t capture the magic of night in a garden. The blue flowers are Plumbago.
“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
So much is blooming with the beginning of “Dry Season” or our Spring and Summer that as I prepared breakfast this morning I decided to take my camera around the garden for few shots before eating, AND, as maybe God intended, two birds got into the photo areas while I did this. I live in a beautiful garden! 🙂
Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. ~Song of Songs 2:12 NIV
The Flowers — Click to Enlarge
Flame Vine or Triquitraque
Red Ginger
Plumbago
Poinsettia
Yellow Bells (my name)
Tibouchina or Princess Flower
Porterweed, a type of Verbena: Stachytarpheta
Desert Rose
Once de Abril
Peacock Flower, Dwarf Poinciana & other names for Caesalpinia pulcherrima
Everywhere I go in Costa Rica I’m captivated by the flowers! Here’s a few from my recent visit to Manuel Antonio, park, hotel grounds, and other locations, Click an image to enlarge it or start a manual slideshow:
NOTE TO OTHER WP BLOGGERS : This is my first post with the new WP5 Editing Software called “Guttenberg.” For now I’m staying with the Theme “Twenty Seventeen” which means my pages still look about the same. Their new recommended default Theme is called “Twenty Nineteen” and designed for the new editor, but does not have the right column I’m used to, so debating over that change, but may try it. The biggest difference on this post now is that the “Quotation Block” looks different and is very nice though it doesn’t seem to allow color typeface like I was using with dark red. But I like the softer quote look. And the “Button” to click for a link to my gallery (or other places) is new and I like that very much. All our different worlds are constantly changing! 🙂
It is finished and is the best summary of my most recent trip which you can thumb through electronically for free in my bookstore or click the cover image below:
This was last night’s hike at Si Como No Greentique Wildlife Refuge and as with all night hikes, photography was difficult and our conscientious guide would not let us shine lights on sleeping birds or a couple of other animals. I would loved to have gotten a photo of the sleeping Kingfisher and the sleeping Gray-necked Wood Rail. We saw but could not photo a sloth and a Kinkajou (too high in tree & moving). None of these pix are particularly good, but they give an idea of what you see on night hikes all over Costa Rica. Though I think my Red-eyed Tree Frog, Glass Frog, & Bullfrog are pretty good. There were also a lot of insects, especially spiders & scorpions of which I got no useable photos.
On the hotel property’s “Wildlife Refuge” or nature trail is a “Butterfly Garden” like you find all over Costa Rica, a big, high ceiling cage with lots of flowering plants and continuously hatching butterflies. Here’s some of the ones I saw there today in a simple little slideshow. I do not have my butterfly book with me, meaning I could have mis-labeled one or two and there is one I have no idea of the name and there was no attendant to help me label them. Most I already knew from all I have photographed all over Costa Rica. Enjoy what Robert Frost calls “Flying Flowers!”
Today’s Butterflies
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“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Last year after Christmas I took the potted Poinsettia I had had inside and planted it in my garden. When I recently asked my gardeners to “thin out” my garden, well . . . they really thinned it out including the removal of my poinsettia which was not doing well anyway.
So today I looked for another poinsettia in town and found only one little plant store that had any and they were expensive, but I got two anyway. They add to the “Christmas Spirit” around my house and I already had in mind putting them immediately in my garden, which I did. Well, the rain seems to have stopped (we might get 1 or 2 more) and the wind has started blowing (think March in the states). The petals or really leaves on the poinsettia are be thrashed by the wind and already look weathered.
Oh well, I meant well and in my thinned out garden there is not much color now, so they have been added to my two other now-blooming red flowers: Red Ginger and Torch Ginger or in Costa Rica El bastón de emperador. So maybe all this red in my gardens is my Christmas color for this year! 🙂
The red of the toyshops on a dark winter’s afternoon, Of Father Christmas and the robin’s breast? Or green? Green of holly and spruce and mistletoe in the house, dark shadow of summer in leafless winter? One might plainly add a romance of white, fields of frost and snow; thus white, green, red- reducing the event to the level of a Chianti bottle. But many will say that the significant colour is gold, gold of fire and treasure, of light in the winter dark; and this gets closer, For the true colour of Christmas is Black. Black of winter, black of night, black of frost and of the east wind, black of dangerous shadows beyond the firelight.
Yes, it’s “Spring” here (la primavera) and almost the beginning of “Summer” (el verano) or Dry Season which starts in December. There are some trees and flowers that bloom this time of year while other bloom at the end of dry season and I can’t explain why because I don’t know. 🙂
I call these my “Yellow Bell Trees” because the flowers are bell-shaped, but that is not the name of them and I can’t seem to get an agreement here on what their English name is. I recently lost two of these trees, so less yellow this year in my garden, but it calls for a Haiku anyway:
