2-28-17 a stroll through the Missouri Botanical Gardens:

One of the reasons I elected to go back to St. Louis was to go to the Orchid Show at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.  They have it every year from something like Jan.- the end of March.  I've gone to it many years.  We happened to be having a really warm winter this year, too, so I was looking forward to wandering around the gardens.  So I messaged my photography friend to see if she wanted to go, too.  She did, and we met today for lunch in the park and a stroll around the gardens as well as checking out the orchid display.
There was quite a few things blooming already!

 looking back towards the entrance building from the gardens.

 the daffodils were pretty much in full bloom.  Love them!

 a low growing ground flower.

 One of the areas of the garden has a yard of crocuses.  They happened to be in bloom now, too.

 the lawn of blooming crocuses and other low flowering plants.

 These looked like azaleas to me, but I'm sure the plaque by them called them some kind of rhodie.

 even some of the dried flowers from last year looked neat.

 and the dried leaves.

 Don't know what these are, but they were blooming nicely already.

 more flowers in the Japanese Garden.

 MOBOT has one of the nicest Japanese Gardens I've ever been in.

 looking towards the bridge where the koi like to hang out under.

 another Japanese statue.

 one of my year around favorite views in the Japanese Gardens.

 Getting ready for St. Patty's day.

 The Climatron where the rain forest is.

 one of the many sculptures throughout the garden.

By now we'd been here about 3 hours---although the first one was while we had lunch in the nice cafe in the gardens.  Now it was time to check out the orchid show.  Every year they have some sort of theme to the show.  This year it was vanilla.  Throughout the show were plaques with info on vanilla and a few vanilla plants.  Unfortunately, none of them were blooming today.

But there were lots of beautiful orchids to check out.

 love all the different colors they come in.

 and shapes.

 even green ones.

 an unusual one.

 even the leaves are interesting.

 so many different shapes and sizes of orchids.

 another green one with a different color lip.

 Don't know what kind this is, but it reminds me of a space ship.

 delicate white ones.

 bold orange ones.

 This was probably my favorite of the orchids this year.  Reminds me of a yellow heart.

 some day I'm going to have to get a macro lens so I can get crisper close ups.

 Never noticed before how some of the orchids look like faces!

 I liked these leopard looking ones, too.

 many have similar colored petals with different colored lips.

 a bit of a normal angle view.

 pretty in pink

 little white ones.

 there were even several kids there---home taught, I presume?  They seemed to enjoy the gardens, too.

 the whole orchid garden is very lush.

 When we were done with the orchids, we wandered around the gift shop.  They have a rather large gift shop with a lot of unusual things in it.  I really thought these were a clever idea.  I have some sea biscuits which I may have do this to.

We easily spent about 5 hours there.  It's things like this that make me miss St. Louis sometimes.  This and meeting up with lots of friends and Ken's family.