Magnolias at the National Arboretum

We walked around the US National Arboretum’s Holly and Magnolia Collection. I never pass up an opportunity to photograph magnolia. The last time I got such an opportunity was a little over a year ago at Mount Vernon. The arboretum has quite a collection of large southern magnolias with blooms low enough for easy photography. This late in the season there are a lot of different stages of blooms and seed pods.

The southern magnolias I was photographing were full of color:

-- Glossy greens and felt browns of leaves

-- Green, red and black of seed pods

-- Fuzzy tan of the bud coverings, creamy white of the full flowers, and brown of the older flowers

I couldn’t resist some 10x magnified images of the pods

Or a flower near the ground that was attracting bees.