I don't know how to translate water garden, something like a garden with a pond... A place with the Maori name Ngatea has a very famous garden. It is known not only for the fact that there is a lot of vegetation, but also for the unbridled sense of humor of its owners, which spills out in unexpected installations and compositions. It rained very luckily while fording and produced lots of colors with droplets.

On New Year's Eve I unexpectedly got a real macro lens - Tokina Macro 100mm\2.8 and decided to go to the botanical garden to take pictures, because I had been there several times, but without a camera. In practice, macro turned out to be not so easy and about 70% of the footage flew into the trash because of shakiness. The shutter speed of 1\320 was sometimes not enough because the photographer wobbles, the flower wobbles, the bumblebee moves... aaaaaaah. In general, as experienced people say, a stabelizer on macro lenses is useless because the world around you is constantly moving. Below are 40 shots of what didn't move much.

The vegetable garden around the house is planted with flowers and various ornamental bushes instead of tomatoes and radishes. All this farm, despite the last days of winter is blooming and smelling. Well and I walked out in these joys stale already on the shelf 80-200\2.8 well and that the photos were as always 16 pieces on previews, finished with flowers from the cell phone.

We're in the middle of a biological event! The Corpse Flower has bloomed in Auckland 🙂 Not that it does this rarely, but the last time it bloomed was in 2013. On the outside, this «flower» over three meters tall. I didn't get to the fragrant blooming period, so I can't tell you anything about the smell, but people who went to smell it say it doesn't stink much. Also in the post threw flower photos made in June-July this year (we have such a winter in the southern hemisphere). Since I don't know what all of them are called, the captions will just be numbers.