May Vacation Part I

Jamie and I recently took a few days to sneak off and enjoy a brief vacation. Our first stop on our trip was Callaway Gardens. I’ve wanted to see the Cecil B. Day Butterfly center for almost 20 years now and I finally got my chance. It was absolutely wonderful, I enjoyed every second we were there and I couldn’t think of another person I would rather have experienced it with than Jamie.

You have to walk a short little woodland trail to get to the Butterflies.

The path is lined with these beautiful Lace Cap Hydrangeas. This one is called ‘Tiara’.

The Conservatory is composed of 854 panes of glass and is maintained at a year round temperature of 84°.

The first things you see when you walk in are the wonderful butterfly prints on the wall and the nursery where they raise the butterflies.

I headed strait to the Conservatory to see the butterflies. I can’t tell you how magical it was to walk into an area filled with almost 1000 butterflies drifting around. I was only there a second when this one decided to take a rest on my shoulder. He stayed there until I finally blew on him to make him fly away. He wasn’t bothering me, but I got tired of people stopping me to take my picture. I despise having my picture made and after about 10 or 15 people I’d had enough.

There are 50 species of butterflies here. I’ll only name the ones I could identify by the charts. Also, Jamie took a lot of these pictures, he was quite the shutterbug chasing butterflies around everywhere.

Owl Butterfly

Thunbergia is a vine that is used a lot at the conservatory and I was excited to find there were more types than I knew about. The red and yellow Thunbergia Mysorensis below is listed as a cold hardy evergreen to zone 10. The Grandiflora dies to the ground every year at our house and grows back, I wonder if the Mysorensis would do the same? Does anyone know? If it does I would absolutely love to have it.

Here’s another vine that was not named in the garden I would love to have it as well. If you know what it is let me know please. It may not be cold hardy in our zone, but I won’t know that until we can identify it.

Blue Morpho

Malaysian Blue Clipper

The Paper Kite butterflies were huge and had such floppy wings I was surprised they could fly. They bounced around like marionettes on strings.

Doesn’t this little guy look like he longing to get to the other side of this window? He seems to be saying “if only I could find a way to get out there.”

I’ll post pictures from Chimney Rock, North Carolina in a couple of days. :-)