Showing posts with label flower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flower. Show all posts

Friday, May 1, 2015

Springtime Blooms at Wildseed Farms

Wildseed Farms
Meadow filled with red corn poppies

One of the things I really missed while living in the tropics was the change of seasons. In Malaysia, we marked the passage of time by whatever festival brought droves of tourists to town rather than through dropping temperatures, shorter days, and changing foliage. Spring is my favorite time of the year, when the earth awakens and the days get longer. I'm delighted to experience it for the first time in four years.

A busy April kept me away from doing the countryside wildflower drives that are de rigueur in the Texas Hill Country. No squatting in a field of bluebonnets for my kids this year. A blank half-day on the calendar at the end of the month gave me just enough time to make the trip from Austin out to Fredericksburg with my parents in tow. With just a few hours to spend, I headed straight for the place guaranteed to have a gorgeous display of blooms, Wildseed Farms which is the largest working wildflower farm in the nation. After these flowers bloom, the tiny seeds are collected, packaged, and sold the the general public, landscape contractors and highway maintenance departments.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Exploring the EPCOT International Flower and Garden Festival

EPCOT, monorail, DisneyWorld, Disney
The decorative berm on the slope surrounding the waterway is covered with 76,000 individual plants for the festival.
225 garden islands of colorful impatiens float in the waterway.


How excited was I about the EPCOT International Flower and Garden Festival? To infinity and beyond. Beyond excited. I've always wanted to attend, and coincidentally, our Spring Break visit was during its multi-week run that ends May 17. Sure, Disney does a fantastic job of keeping its parks pretty throughout the year, but they really step it up a few notches at EPCOT during the festival with the addition of over 200,000 new plants. Flowered berms replace grassy hillsides and large topiaries stand proudly in flower beds. As an extra perk, additional food booths pop up around the World Showcase, and a few playgrounds are added in Future World. 
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