A Saturday Morning Walk

This morning, I read the camera manual in an attempt to figure out how to make our camera focus on small, intricate objects better.  There's a "flower" button; I am skeptical about its efficacy.  Nevertheless, thus prepared Dexter and I set out on a long walk with the camera.

Dexter, the best dog ever

We live near an office park, and they've built a pond surrounded by wildflowers and a nice walking track with a couple of bridges.  It's a fantastic place to walk, especially on the weekends when there's no one working. 

I'm very enamored by water lilies and lotus flowers.*   They're gorgeous, but more than that, I love that they grow in mucky water, pushing up and up through the ick until they reach the surface.  I love that something this beautiful can grow in the midst of something so dirty.  It's a fantastic metaphor, and one about which I've thought a lot.

If you look closely, you can see a bud underwater, beginning to open even before it reaches the surface.

This picture is the primary reason I wanted to take this walk:

Besides the lilies, we saw other beautiful things.

I tried to get a great shot of a duck bum, but no luck.  Tricky ducks.

There were bees everywhere.  They were too busy with the flowers to pay any attention to us.

These berries were growing beside one of the bridges.

I think the purple of this grass is beautiful.  When we went to the garden center to buy some ornamental grass for our yard, they said that perennial grasses will fade quickly, so don't get your hopes up that purple will stay purple through the years.  These seem to do fine though.

I would like to thank Zyrtec for making it possible for me to see the beauty of goldenrod.

There were clusters of small pink, orange, and purple flowers.

There's something unabashedly happy about wildflowers.  They are flamboyantly beautiful in the midst of a crush of other plants.

On the way back from the pond, we pass this rock.**  I love the colors on it.

It was a lovely way to start the weekend.  I hope you all are having a delightful day as well.

*Apparently, there's a difference.

**You can tell how dry it is here by how brown the grass is.  That's how our whole yard looks, except for the occasional green weed, of course.