close-up | The Nature of Things

This year, the Chicago Botanic Garden is celebrating its 50th Anniversary. I have been visiting the Garden for almost that many years and have been a member for a good many of those. And for the past eleven years I have included posts featuring the Garden here on WordPress.

Naturally, many of the pictures are of flowers, although with most posts I have tried, not always successfully, to stick to a single theme, be it color, season or one particular area of the Garden. This time I’d like to present my close-up view of the Garden.

There are 12 featured areas in the Garden which include:- Bulb, Circle, Crescent, Enabling, English Walled Garden, Evening Island, Fruit and Vegetable Garden, Heritage, Japanese, Native Plant, Rose and Sensory Gardens. Each one of these is beautifully set out and maintained with a colorful array of flowers and plants.

But the Garden is about so much more than just the flowers. It’s about the buildings and bridges, the statuary and structures such as the bell tower and its ‘command center’ hidden among the treetops.

There are also three natural areas in the Garden including:- McDonald Woods, the Prairie and the Nature Reserve. So let’s not forget the wildlife. The larger birds are easy to spot, but the smaller ones like the mother hummingbird with her baby in its nest are not quite so easy to find. And watch out for the giant fish lurking underneath the Serpentine Bridge by Evening Island.

This probably won’t be my last post on the Chicago Botanic Garden this year, but I will certainly endeavor to come up with a fresh angle and new pictures in future features.

Many thanks to Ann-Christine for her choice of Close-Up as the topic for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. This came at a most opportune time for me since, on Friday, I went to the Chicago Botanic Garden specifically to get some close-up images at the Orchid Show. This was something in the nature of an experiment. I don’t have a macro lens as such, but I came across a box filled with filters and adapters some of which I used to use with my old Minolta film camera. Naturally, the macro filter didn’t fit any of my digital lenses but after cobbling together a weird combination of zoom lens, wide-angle adapter and macro filter I finally came away with something that I thought might work and, I have to say, although not perfect the results weren’t too bad.