Getting Ready For Spring

Spring season comes early in Las Vegas. Temperatures are steadily rising and you'll just be surprised that the numbers start hitting three (3) digits. It's high time to prepare the yard and the plants for new growth and new blooms. 

I started working on our lantana plants in our front yard. I pruned the vines on the first week of February, and they looked like this:

After cleaning it's surroundings and fixed the water drip system, I put some fertilizers to soften the trauma of pruning. 

As of this writing, I noticed a small green sprouting out. 

I can't wait to see our lantanas bloom again come spring. 

photo courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org

photo courtesy of ohmyyard.com

Once thay start growing new vines and  full of flowers, they will look beautiful and covering part of our front yard. 

Morning Coffee

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It's a Wednesday, my first day back to work for this week. To start my day I'll be going to the gym but dropped by Starbucks first for my hot soy mocha. Sipping on my coffee outside the coffee shop, I saw this small bush of flowers that I need to take a picture of. Taking it on another perspective, it looked like its a whole wall of these flowers when actually its only a foot high.

Full Bloom

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After work this morning, I went to a friend's house to invite them for breakfast. As I get into their house, I was surprised to see that all their roses & other flowering plants are in full bloom. I can't help myself but snap pictures with my iPhone. Your phone cam is indeed a very good camera for emergencies. It is all ready to snap pictures anytime.

Honeysuckle

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At last I have confirmed the name of those mysterious sweet smelling white flowers that bloomed in our backyard. Its name is "honeysuckle" more specifically the white honeysuckle or Japanese honeysuckle. A friend of mine actually replied to my request to tell me the name of that flower and when he gave me the name I immediately went online to learn more about it. I have seen the pictures being posted online so I think my friend was right, those were indeed honeysuckle. According to Wikipedia, there are about 180 species of honeysuckle. I'm quite positive that our plant belong to the Japanese honeysuckle. The pictures I got and the pictures posted online are identical. The scientific name of a Japanese honeysuckle is Lonicera Japonica.

More on Macro

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Im still not over with the excitement on my new macro lens. I know its kind of repetitive already but since I'm working I cant just go out anytime I want to use my camera and start shooting. So, every opportunity really counts a lot. I have invaded the Bellagio Conservatory already and in fact I have posted the pictures in my Facebook page. This time around, I was just looking around our house and found that one of our shrubs are actually blooming with small white flowers and they smelled good too. I kind of remember the fragrance of the Philippines' National Flower which is Sampaguita. Sampaguita by the way is known as Arabian Jasmine in English and its scientific name is Jasminum Sambac. I got this information when I Googled it and redirected me to the Wikipedia website. Anyway, I know that our shrub is not a sampaguita but its flowers smelled as good as sampaguita.

Based on the picture I posted in here, can anyone tell me the name of this flower?

Tulips

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I took this picture when I was in the Mirage Resort waiting for the American Idol show. I was just walking around the property and found a series of tulips arrangements. I actually checked them first if they were the real deal and yes indeed they were. In fact the resorts here never display faux plants and flowers as far as I know it. I think this was just a simple flower arrangement, unlike Ikebana the Japanese art of flower arrangement. In Ikebana, it strictly follows three main points that symbolizes heaven, earth and man or in some others sun, moon & earth.

Beautiful Weeds 2

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This is my second installment of highlighting the lowly weeds in our backyard before cutting them off this Spring season. This is one of the two varieties that bears tiny flowers. Tiny that I have to use my macro lens attachment for my iPhone camera.

Beautiful Weeds

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Winter is almost over and when Spring season starts, everything seems to grow fast. Trees would grow new leaves and branches. Flowers will start to bloom and even the lowly weeds would grow in the yard and some would bear little flowers. I have noticed this morning that the weeds have already grown in our front yard as well as in the backyard. I think there were three (3) kinds of weeds flourishing in our yard and two (2) of them were flower bearing. The first one is featured today. The other one will be for tomorrow. They were so tiny that I just used a macro lens attached to my iPhone camera to make it appear regular flowers. I cant believe they were pretty, too.