Nature part 2.

Ahh, let's show you a bit of the yard. There are so many amazing flowers blooming. Every few weeks we get new surprises. This is the side yard...the house lined with various bushes and flowering plants--a few are in bloom here--some hard to see.A little section in the back yard against the house. These pink ones have really gone crazy (much fuller than this picture)--they are so fun to cut and put in vases.
The front/side of the house. This bed of flowers has had so many blooms not pictured. Amazing.
All from the yard. We grow little girls too.
And these critters. Our big oak tree out front was covered with these caterpillars from the base up to about 4 feet high in the tree! There were caterpillars everywhere!! Hundreds. I thought they'd have made cocoons but they look like they are just frying there. What's up? We probably need an exterminator. Or a boy to go kill the rest. He poked one with a stick, trying to nudge it into a container and catch it. He said it exploded. Literally. With brown liquid inside. He showed me the explosion splash in the container. Gross.
In the waaaaay back corner of the back yard there is a small bunch of trees and shrubs growing randomly. We found it to be sweeeet grounds for a fort. It was easy to hollow out inside. It even has this tree with a branch arching over the kid-size entrance--so cool. Now will someone get my fraidy cat kids to go play out there?? I would be spending all day in that fort if I was 10!! They hardly touch it. Do they need a few years? Or just someone to show them how it's to be used?...let me know. If you ask me it's too far from the house and they are scared. Pooh.
Ah, we found that we have a raspberry bush!!
Oh, I wrote about the evil tree. Well, here it is in all its evilness. Check out those babies.
This thorn is longer than my longest finger. And I've seen even bigger thorns.
Daniel burned a TON of branches and yard debris with some help from our terribly generous (and experienced) neighbor. After all the burning (where we had stashed many thorny branches) he noticed a thing bothering his foot as he walked about the yard. He took off his shoe and a thorn had punctured through his entire sole and was nudging at his sock!! They are evil, I say!!
These were some fun flowers we'd never seen before. Earlier in the spring we watched the tight little perfectly spherical buds open with great anticipation! Now they are known as the purple puff-balls.A clematis, now growing wild and beautiful.
And here are the baby birds I mentioned a while back. They nested under the clematis pictured above. Can you see their red mouths open wide? It seems as though only one of the five babies survived. I think the rest got taken by predators. A few weeks back I saw the survivor hopping about out of the nest, still getting food from Mom! It's surely off flying by now .
Last, but definitely CUTEST. Bunnies. I know I mentioned them before, but this is new. A while ago when I was mowing, suddenly 3--4--5 baby bunnies hopped in a panic out of our flower beds!! They were about the cutest thing ever!! So tiny, and so many of them! Scampering all over. I put on the brakes and just watched them figure out how on earth to escape the big green mowing beast. It was precious. The kids and I spotted a few of them again briefly. They are adorable.