Flowers in Bavaria and Salzburg

With the number of pictures I've taken in the past year, sorting through them can be a bit overwhelming. Tabitha and I recently toured Bavaria and Salzburg in addition to all the trips Jason and I have taken this year. I have decided to break things up and post some of the pictures separately. Today, you'll get to see one of my new favorite things to take pictures of: flowers! They were taken between May 17 and May 25, 2011.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber:
Anyone know what this flower is? I found it just outside one of the town gates.

Regensburg:
These pansies were somewhere in between the cathedral and the remains of an old Roman gate.

Salzburg:
The rest of the pictures are from Salzburg, which is full of beautiful flowers!

I found this one when we were waiting on the cable car to take us up one of the mountains. The clover patch was right in front of a beautiful stream.

Sitting above Salzburg is the Hohensalzburg Fortress. These beautiful flowers were growing on the side of the fortress.

The tour of the fortress ended in a lovely little courtyard. I found these flowers in a planter there.

We also visited Hellbrun Palace. I found these flowers while we were waiting for a tour of the trick fountains.

That afternoon, we toured a salt mine outside of Salzburg. The mine entrance fee also included entrance to an old, recreated Celtic village. The only redeeming part of the village was this find:

Most of my flower pictures are from Mirabell Gardens. The same gardens where "Do-Re-Mi" was filmed.

Flowers

It has been brought to my attention that I have not been posting enough on this particular blog. I'm sorry folks, but I just haven't taken many pictures lately and I feel guilty posting without pictures. So, here are some of the photos I have taken with my iPhone over the last 3.5 months. (Please forgive the picture quality)

 These flowers were the first of the season. It was so lovely to see color after a long, dark winter.

I think the contents of this picture dates the image: can you find the Easter egg? This pic was taken about a week after Easter... it seems everyone always leaves one!

I found green! And purple!

The River Saale. This view is from Paradies Park and the peak in the distance is Jenzig. We hiked the peak the following week and found a beer garden at the top! Yay Germany!

This bridge is the oldest one crossing the Saale in Jena. Just outside the view to the left is... you guessed it! A beer garden!

Every year my institute has a summer festival on the longest day of the year. Germans know how to party! It started at 4pm and lasted until they ran out of beer and wine... around 2am.
Nicely though, the firedancers didn't get drunk until after the fire was out!

Two weeks ago the institute I work for sent out an email telling us all about this little flower. Or should I say, GINORMOUS flower? The scientific name is Amorphophallus titanum, and I think you can deduce what that means on your own. When David Attenborough did a series for the BBC on The Secret Life of Plants, he decided he wasn't about to say the scientific name over and over, so he dubbed it Titan arum. Some places call it the carrion flower instead because it smells like rotting meat. It's aptly named. This flower blooms very rarely (only a bloom or two max thoroughout the world every year) and the bloom only lasts for about 24 hours. I took this photo about 18 hours into the bloom cycle and you can see that the middle stalk has already fallen over. There are only two of these flowers in Germany and one is located across the street from where I work at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

What have you been up to for the last 4 months?