Botanical Garden Trip!!

Hello!  Today I have a post that I'm super excited about (but maybe I'm just weird haha!)!!  A few days we went to the Botanical Garden and it was so fun; we got to see things there that we never have before!  We had a picnic lunch and got to see tons of flowers, plants, etc.  Mom thought this would be a great time for me to take some pictures for school of course so with us came the camera.  And luckily I had spare batteries packed--otherwise there would only be a couple pictures!  Instead there lots and lots so be prepared to get an eyeful of plant life :)  Underneath each picture is a caption specifying what each category the plant is.  If you need to decipher the names (why am I calling a palm tree a cycad?!) see below!
Cycad=palm tree that produces cones instead of fruit such as coconuts, dates, etc.
Angiospermae=flowering/fruiting plants with seeds inside the flower/fruit
Gymnospermae=plants/trees that bear just seeds, no fruit (example: conifers)

Cycad

Lichen--I learned perspective stuff in my 4H Photo project, hence the angle

More Cycads!  Yay! ;)

These plants can live to be 1500 to 2000 years old!!

This is a horsetail, it is related to pine trees.

Hello there, Mr Lizard!  There were tons of these guys in the desert section.

Angiospermae--the purple is stunning, don't you think?!

This was a water snake.  He was swimming with his pal in the pond :)

And one woman found this newt egg sac and picked it out of the water to show the kids.  She let me take a picture.  You could see the tiny newt babies!

These two are both Angiospermae.  This might sound kinda weird, but the long thing in the middle is actually the female part of the flower, and the shorter ones are the male ones.

Algae floating in another pond (there are several)

Truthfully, I have no idea what this is, but I really like playing around with perspective shots!

Moss...not much else to say about it!

A beautiful rose!! Reminded me of springtime :)

I took a picture of this celestial sphere thing because of my last science unit: astronomy.

Another picture of an angiosperm, but this one I took because of the leopard pattern on the petals!

They had the most beautiful streams with miniature waterfalls; fairytale woods I swear.

Gymnospermae...a conifer.

Again, weird thought, but these are female pinecones--

--And the male pinecone.

I really hope you enjoyed these pictures, they took a looong time to upload haha and these are maybe half of all of them!!  Mom is teaching me so much in this unit and it's really fun.  See the transformation--a girl who never really liked science before...now using multiple exclamation points while talking about it :)  Must be the magic of homeschooling right?!

Happy Homeschooling!