The Van Zante Family: Botanical Center, Part 2: The Plants

Someday, I'm going to have a huge, beautiful flower garden! Complete with stepping stones, waterfall, ornaments and a bench on which I'll sit back and take it all in! Until then, I will admire the beauty created by God designed by the handiwork of others. I didn't take quite as many pictures of the flowers and plants as I would have liked (the camera just wasn't quite up to the task in the dimly lit dome), but I did get a few. Enjoy!

At the entrance to the Botanical Center were two flower beds, in which were many tulips. It smelled exactly like spring.

Further into the center was a wall with flower pots attached. These pots had lovely flowers, ranging from native Iowa flowers to exotic tropicals.

This tree was the one that captured my attention the most after the flowers. It was a very tall tree with these huge flat leaves growing out of the very top of the trunk, straight upwards.

The goldfish pond.

This was a pretty neat tree with some kind of fruit growing from it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a coconut, but I'm not quite sure what it was.

Miniature banana tree. Cool, huh?

This was in the cactus garden, so it must have been some sort of cacti...as you can see. It was pretty tall, but instead of the needle-like spikes that we're used to seeing on cacti, it had these thorn-like spikes with about nickel sized leaves growing among them.

This was the best picture I could get of a tree that had a thin stem-like vine growing downward with flowers growing from the tips of the vines. It was something that you could look at all day and still not quite figure it out.