cindeea, these are Gorgeous!! You must have a steady hand with your camera. Love the blurred background effect [bokeh]

Thanks beetle, I am just learning how to use the macro setting on my digital and to focus on my subject and blur the surrounding and background areas. Miss Fritillary was so well behaved and let me photo her. I actually handle a lot of my caterpillar babies because they get laid on my smaller passion vines. I have to move them to the large plant. Dennis wonders if they know me because they are often found after they just come out of their crysallis hanging on my shirt and pant legs. Am I their surrogate mother? lol

Baby Cats being relocated.
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So these are the infamous butterflies all over your place?

Cindee that's so neat! I love that you're a butterfly mommy!

Beautiful pictures, Cindee! Very interesting subject! Butterflies are so pretty, and there are so many kinds! We have lots of different butterflies up here, and we have these huge green Luna Moths that are so awesome looking! The caterpillars of the Luna Moth are huge! Some are about the size of a hotdog!

I'm just learning to use my macro settings, too! It's fun to take pictures when you know how to properly use your camera, isn't it? I'm loving it!

One of my movies will start with a picture of a pupa breaking up and a butterfly crawling out of it, dry, and fly away. When you free yourself of your real or imagined burdens you'll get lightweight and you can soar away... I think it will pretty much set the feel for the movie. :o)

Soultan, that is beautiful..Watching a butterfly emerge is pure beauty. I love the way they come to me with damp wings and cling to my shirt flapping and drying their wings. I wonder what they are thinking as they emerge and welcome life and find my gardens full of nectar.

That must be very interesting to have millions of butterflies around. Did you invite them over or they just decided to create this little community at your garden by themselves?

Oh I definitely invited them. It was my plan when we first built our home to create a creature friendly yard with a lot of butterflies, dragonflies, birds and hummingbirds. Although I have only had 1 hummingbird, I have a red shouldered hawk, Mockingbirds, doves and a pair of Cardinals that have raised 3 families in my shrubs. Ever since I was a kid I have loved critters. I get an occasional bunny and a handful of Egrets too as well as box turtles strolling through.

Cindee!

Gulf Fritillary? They are everywhere here also, and indeed, by invitation! I grow as many things as I can to assure that they will have a happy home in my yard.

It is strange that they eat every leaf off some passiflora varieties, but do not seem to like the Red one.

Anyway, it makes pruning easy. No dead leaves to discard, only vines. You see, my passiflora go dormant every winter.

Love 'em!

Elizabeth, some of the red passion vines are lethal to butterfly eggs. The babies can not eat the leaf without dying. Vitiflora in particular. Lady Margaret, a more wine red passie is a host but the redder or orange red will not allow eggs to develop. Mine love my p. Incense and p. subarosa.

I wish I could send you one of the cacti that hummingbirds love... But they are too big to pack up. They flower every Spring-Summer, and there are dozens of hummingbirds around the house because of this...

So cool Soultan. What kind of cacti is this that attracts the hummingbirds? Do you have a photo? When I first met Dennis he was living at the foot of the Ozarks in Rockaway Beach MO, near Branson. I have never seen so many hummingbirds. He had feeders all around the 3 levels of the fishing lodge he owned. I would sit on the step with morning coffee, watching the mist lift off Lake Tanecomo and see hummingbirds everywhere. There were a dozen hummingbirds each morning at the feeders. They would buzz my face, seeing their image in my eye glasses. Oh to feel the delicate fluttering wings at your face of a ruby throat was indeed a heavenly experience!

These cacti are on our neighbor's property. The deer regularly trample all over them as they pass and go to the top of the hill... Sometimes I see the coyote passing as well. Thank God we put up a high fence so Toto is safe and no wild animal can come in our garden and house...
So I might try to risk my life and check out if I can separate a small seedling from these cacti... I will try to steal one for you... (Or maybe just ask the neighbor to give me one, but that would be so conventional.) So hold on. I will see if there are small ones... And I have absolutely no idea wat kind of cacti these are... They look similar to aloe veras and stuff. Maybe I will try to make a picture, but they are not a pretty sight, since my neighbor don't water them, so the hillside is quite dry and they have a lot of dry leaves as well.

Soultan, was the cactus this by any chance?

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NO. I will have to take some pictures while breaking my neck... These cacti look like aloe veras... It is night here right now, so the earliest is tomorrow when I can attempt making some pics if I don't forget. If I catch this thread in the middle of the day, I will go and take some pics. That will remind me.

Well don't break your neck silly! =) We need you alive and in one piece so if it's that dangerous veto the pictures.

I will try... I will only break my neck trying to steal them.

We have hummingbirds galore... different sizes and colors, even!

They love my Pineapple Sage plants, morning glories, honeysuckle vines, and we also keep feeders full of nectar for them... I tried to photograph them over summer, but I didn't know how to use the macro settings on my camera at that time...

We have a pair of HUGE owls that live in the oak trees, and there are hawks, doves, goldfinches, cardinals... we have tons of deer, coyotes, coy dogs, fox, ground hogs, squirrels... and even the less desirable voles and moles and other rodents... we are loaded with critters!

Cindee, you'd love it... except for the cold winters... we have a veritable nature preserve here... we have woods, fields, bog, and swamp... there's a fast running stream with fish, turtles, beaver, muskrat, herons, and I've even seen the occasional snowy white bird... I'm not sure if it's an egret or what it is...

There are butterflies, every kind of bird and bug you could imagine, tons of native plants, and fields of wildflowers! In spring and summer, it's really nice here... fall is nice, too, but I'm not a big fan of winter... the birds fly south, the bugs are gone, the animals hole up for winter... the trees and shrubs are bare... the fields are brown... but when spring rolls around again, everything comes back to life!

Jodi, that sounds like paradise to me!

Soultan, I have a couple flowering cactus. Pax that one you displayed is HUGE! Does it have fragrance?

Okay. Here is the aloe vera picture. I could not go closer to them, sorry. Maybe you can still see. There is one flowering on the very far side of the downslope, but I could not make good pictures of it. Sorry about this pic too. I took it from very far, so they did not come out pretty well. But here it is:

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Hummingbird Cacti

I didn't know Aloe flowered. Neat!

It is a succulant. I have to find out what it is. It has little red flowers.

It looks exactly like the large Aloe Vera plants that our friend used to bring back from his mother's yard in Arizona! One of them actually flowered for me! It was a very tall stem with a small flower bract... I don't even remember what color it was, that's how nondescript the flowers are... but, yes, they do flower...

They flower a LOT, and hummingbirds love the nectar. They are all over these plants.