Birmingham Botanical Gardens

This past week I went to Birmingham Alabama to visit my boyfriend for a week - April 4th to April 10th. I took the Red-Eye flight Tuesday night so I could have as much time as possible. We mostly did shopping and boring things Wednesday because I was not feeling great and Thursday he had work and class all day. Friday was our first opportunity to do something fun so we went to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens which is awesome. It is totally free to the public, even parking is free. All they have is one sign up for donations.

Josh was a good support about going to the gardens, he was in-charge of picture taking so some of the pictures are a little funny. Like this one, he tries to take random pictures of me with the flowery landscape.



I LOVE lilies!! We ended up going to the gardens twice - once Friday and again Easter Sunday after church so we could try and find all the lily gardens. This is the Easter Lily which I thought was appropriate to take of a picture with on Easter Sunday.



The Botanical Gardens have supposedly a very accurate representation of authentic Japanese Gardens. It was very beautiful but my favorite part was this pond where a Canadian Goose was nesting in the middle and another one swam and scared me to death when it flew up onto the bridge.



The fish were very cool too, Josh spend almost half and hour trying to get a good picture of them but the water is super dirty but these fish were SO bright and big! They are Koi which meant something to Josh but not to me - apparently these are very expensive fish.





I LOVED these flowers, they are Chinese Snowballs or something like that, I thought at first they were a relative to Hydrangea.



Josh and I in-front of some pretty purple flowers.



This flower was BEAUTIFUL, it stood out like the sun in the flower bed, absolutely gorgeous.





A very kind man was taking pictures in the same side of the garden we were and offered to take a picture of Josh and I. It is a good picture, the shade hit both of us at different parts of our face but it is a sweet picture I think.



More of the pretty purple flowers :)



Josh LOVES the greenery in all nature, so the gardens were fun for him too. There were tons of beautiful green trees for him and lots of colorful fun flowers for me. We took a lot of pictures of trees with a beautiful shimmering light filtering through.



Oh my Goodness, these flowers were SO pretty, the color was so vibrant and the flower was just cheerful and fun to look at. My camera does not quite capture the delicate details but trust me, it was awesome.



This flower is an Azalea and I remember because I loved its fragrance, most of the flowers smelled nice but this flower was just lovely AND it is HUGE! I do not think you can tell by the picture but this flower is easily twice as big as my head.



This was one of the first flowers we saw on our first day there, you can tell the two days we were there. I am in a gray and cream dress the first day, Josh in a black shirt and then Sunday we are both dressed up for church.





This floral plant was breath-taking. I loved the color and texture of it, especially with the sun setting it was beautiful.



Here is the first of lilies we found and I LOVED them! My favorites are calla lilies but were never found any and we looked everywhere. But these were so cool, I have never seen any in water before.



This picture turned out super well, actually one of my favorites of the two of us. The only thing that I do not like is that Josh is convinced I have blue eyes - kind of a long standing joke and in this picture my eyes really do look blue.



I had a GREAT trip, my camera actually died on Sunday while Josh was taking a picture of me in the Gardens. We didn't get pictures of me and him canoeing but probably for the best, I had a small panic attack on the river. I am pretty afraid of water and drowning is a BIG concern. But I pulled through and learned to use the oar and got pretty decent on the canoe and had fun. We went on a bike ride Monday and just had a great time together. Next time I will remember to bring my camera charger.