Flowers fascinate me. I love taking close-up photos of flowers. I thought I knew what an orchid looked like, until I went to a special exhibit of orchids at a botanical garden. It wasn’t a large exhibit but it displayed more orchids than I had ever seen. I’ve since learned there are 25,000 to 30,000 different species of orchids, making up the largest family of plants in the world. Did you know we even get vanilla from an orchid plant? That was news to me! I had never given a thought to the origin of vanilla.

I took many photos of the orchids and later sketched some of them with pencil and colored pencils. These orchids look like they could be characters in a children’s story book. Hmmm, maybe someday I’ll be inspired to write a story about some of them.

What flowers have inspired your creativity?