Powell Gardens

Last Friday I spent the morning at Powell Gardens with Karen, my niece. We got there when it opened at 9 a.m. to beat the crowds and it is a good thing we did.  By 11 a.m., when we left, it was getting very crowded.  When we scheduled the day, I didn't realize that Friday was the opening day of the Butterfly Festival in addition to the ongoing Lego sculptures which is what we going to see. We went to the butterfly exhibit first before it got too crowded. I saw the butterflies in Tucson several times but this was the first time Karen had been to see the live butterflies. After the butterflies, we walked part of the gardens and saw some of the Lego exhibits before it got too hot for me. Below are some pictures of the day.

Here are some of the butterflies and a caterpillar in the exhibit which was in an enclosed room where they added trees, flowers, bushes, etc for them to land on. In the top right picture, that is a butterfly that landed on my hair and wouldn't go away until the volunteer moved it.  She said it liked my hairspray. 

Here are some of the sculptures from the Lego's Exhibit. They had a Lego's exhibit in the gardens a couple of years ago by the same artist. Here is a list of how many lego bricks are in each item: Top row l-r: Hummingbird and Flower = 31,565 legos; Bald Eagle = 42,198 legos. Middle row l-r: Milk Snake and Mouse = 12,069 legos; Monarch Butterfly on Milk Weed Blooms = 60,549 legos. Bottom row l-r: Kneeling Gardner (life size) = 34,340 legos and Roto-Tiller = 20,903 legos. I absolutely cannot imagine the patience it would take to put 60,000 legos in place to make something!

Misc flowers in the gardens. Top right, middle left and bottom right pictures are from the Water Garden. Middle right is an artichoke plant. 

We got a lesson in biology from the volunteer in the Butterfly Exhibit. The cycle of a butterfly is that a butterfly lays eggs which "hatch" and turn into caterpillars which become pupa (cocoon) which "hatch" and a butterfly emerges. In the above pic, these are pupa with two butterflies that have been "born". After they emerge from the pupa, it takes s1-3 hours for the wings ton "inflate" and dry before they are ready to fly. The butterfly on the right is older than the one on the left. After they are "inflated" and dry, they are then released into the open area where they try out their wings and get the hang of flying. We could watch the ones flying around and tell which ones were still learning.....