Much like a swamp park, I find it hard to turn down a visit to a botanical garden.
These are great locations to familiarize yourself with the flora of the area. Some, like the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, are designed to capture the various ecosystems of an entire state. Others will focus on the flora of their local area. Still others will focus on a particular type of flowers, such as the rose gardens of Vander Veer Botanical Park in Davenport, Iowa.
On my second trip to Asheville, I found myself with time to visit the North Carolina Arboretum. These gardens contain both cultivated and natural landscapes, with particular emphasis on the flora of the southern Appalachian mountains, and with educational programming for young and old alike. The blooms were transitioning from summer to fall, so this made for an interesting blend of subjects.
The summer blooms included a batch of sunflowers. These are flowers that are almost impossible to photograph poorly: the contrast of their colors, the sharp definition of their petals, and their size make for easy composition. These flowers are ubiquitously splashed across linens, ceramics, paintings, just about anything and everything. They are an image that is so familiar to us that in some way, they may be that prototypical image that first comes to mind when someone says "flower."Given their plentiful presence, it would seem difficult to capture a new perspective on that quintessential flower, but as I strolled among the flowerbeds, I found one just beginning to open. The petals were still delicately tucked into one another, as if hesitant to unfurl so late in the season:
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