Gilbert: Birds and Butterflies

The Orchid Homestead had birds as well.


These are Lori birds and we got to feed them!


Lots of orchids as well of course.




A banana plant in bloom.


Next we visited the butterfly garden.


That is not a butterfly!


It sure was a pretty garden.


If you were careful you could get close enough to take pictures.


I spotted this dead butterfly, a reminder of how fragile these creatures are.






This one had just transformed!




What a beautiful garden for the butterflies.


A butterfly with glass-like wings.










There's the statue again. Beautiful, but a butterfly garden is a weird place to put it in my opinion.




So cool to see them from so closeby.




After the butterfly garden there were more orchids to admire.








What a beautiful place.

I wonder what more we will get to see.

Next: more animals

Gilbert: So Many Flowers!

This blogging thing is more challenging than I thought. It's fun to go on trips, but what a work to get the pictures sorted and up to the blog. But here is finally part 2 of our trip to Germany. Although... this outing was in the Netherlands.


We went to the Orchideeën Hoeve on Saturday!
It was a grey and cold day, but we were going to be mostly inside. The Orchideeën Hoeve (Orchid Homestead) has lots of orchids as you might guess by the name, but also animals!


Soon after entering I spotted my first animals: turtles.


There were beautiful orchids everywhere we looked.


Even above our heads!


There were also statues hiding among the foliage




This one is a little creepy I think.






This plant reminded me of pine cones.


There were lots of fish swimming in the artificial streams.


I totally love this orchid. So beautiful.


These really blue ones are painted.


There was a canoe in the stream as well.
I think it was just for decoration, it didn't look really seaworthy.


A bearded statue.






There were catfish as well.
My owner got to feed them with shrimp. That was fun to watch.


Some orchid blossoms were really tiny!


Here's a closeup.


A taxi bike.
It was also just for decoration sadly enough, or I'd have let my owner bike me around.






Turtle closeup!


What a wonderful place the Orchid Homestead was. And we hadn't even seen everything yet!

Next: birds and bees butterflies