Located northeast of midtown the Atlanta Botanical Garden is over 30 acres of very well developed and organized horticultural displays. They claim to be the emerald jewel of Atlanta culture and rival other major botanical gardens we have visited.
It does seem that they have tried to pack 90 acres of garden into the site and I hope you can see from the following pictures it can be somewhat overwhelming. We spent most of a full day here and could not carefully examine every part of the garden in only one visit. From several places the Atlanta skyline is visible in the background. On a whimsical note you need to share the bench with the frogs.
Starting here in the Desert House all of these plants are from Africa and Madagascar and none of them are cacti which evolved in the Americas.
They also have a few critters wandering if you have sharp eye and ear.
In February of 2010 they were having a major orchid show and looking at their website here in February of 2019 they are still are doing the same deal. This picture of the wall leading into the main orchid exhibits is sort of a compromise. If I stood back to show the whole wall none of the flowers would really show and closer misses it's sheer size.
While she was living in Corpus Christi, Texas my green thumb sister raised orchids commercially for awhile until she got over whelmed by the big boys. It seems like today you need to be huge or have a small enough market that no one wants to bother taking it away. I took all these pictures with the vision of assembling some sort of mosaic for her but I am about as far behind on that project as this site. While I don't have the eye of the connoisseur my own favorites are the ones with the thin spidery leaves leaves.
Sort of making a transition here the small winged flowers were in with the orchid display while they have close resemblance to the true pitcher plants hanging in the humidified tropical garden.
Getting back to the regular garden is a series showing the variety of plants in the garden.
Here I was just trying a series of close up on various flowers.
There is a song I sing when playing with my guitar both because of the fast catchy tune and it irritates Lori called "May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose". Now that I have discovered the "Bird of Paradise" flower I can really understand the curse it was meant to be in the song. Ouch!
Finishing up here are some real frogs. I think the green guy is just a normal friendly type, but the yellow guys are poison dart frogs from South America and are not recommended for petting. Unfortunately this is just a small sampling of the diverse plants in the garden. I know our friend Ruth Lambert would have liked to see them and we shall return again.