Schreiner's Iris Garden

About a million years ago, my friend Deborah and I went to Shreiner's Iris Garden in Keizer to take some pictures. I wasn't really feeling it (which means I only took maybe 150 photos instead of 400 :P) but I do have a handful of pictures to share and I know Deborah was curious to see them. Many are not of irises since I've taken so many in the past. (You can see more irises if you click on the Schreiner's tag.)

I always get a little addicted to photographing these, for some reason.

Deborah gives us a little size comparison for these poppies. NOTE: Deborah is like 6 feet tall.

I couldn't decide where I wanted to focus.

The lovely Deborah. In the first photo I joked that she was so proper with her sitting posture, so the right picture is her response.

Some people's houses meet up with this public garden, which would be kind of interesting for those residents. I am sure many people mistakenly walk into the yards that aren't gated.

The plant nursery/store had lots of cute flowers.

After we left the garden, Deborah was really nice about pulling over in different places so I could get more pictures.

Like with this iris field. I've never been here or taken pictures because it's not really open to the public (that I know of). But there aren't signs saying to keep out, either, and we were able to drive on a dirt road so I could get out and walk around in them.

These pictures remind me how much I need to improve with landscape photography. For such a cool subject, the photos are pretty bland.

Drive by.


There you go! Thanks for looking, and thanks again to Deborah for accompanying me to the garden, and chauffeuring me around the iris fields. :)

Iris Garden Pt. 2

Happy (?) Memorial Day! How patriotic am I?

I'm here for another installment of iris garden photos. The set from my first visit can be found here. Also, kid portraits from this second visit are here. There were definitely a lot of different things blooming on this second visit, and many things had died off. I was so glad I took as many poppy photos as I had on the first visit, because most of them have died now.


This photo is special because it is number 5000 on my camera! I got this camera about a year ago after being SLR-less for a year since my first one had died. Going a year without has definitely made me appreciate having one again.


Before you become skeptical of this garden's title, I should post an irisy photo. Hopefully I'm not duplicating too much from my first post (I haven't even compared). I tried to photograph the more unique-looking ones. Check out the trim on the left iris. 


This garden would make a nice place for some engagement photos. How cute would this photo be if a happy couple was sitting on the bench?


It's almost a little sad that I'm photographing benches, but I wanted to capture the scene. And yeah, that's someone's house in the background. I wonder what it's like to live next to an iris garden. A couple of the yards have openings into them, and people go in. I'm not sure if you're supposed to, though. 


These are black irises, though obviously really just a very dark purple-blue. They look much blacker in real life--it's just hard to capture that without having a really odd, detail-less photo. Anyway, I think they're kind of cool.


I can't resist dogwood blossoms. I guess this is a variation of a dogwood tree, anyway.





I think the color peach is coming back in style. It probably has some other trendy name, though, like "mint orange." I've always liked it, though. 




These photos aren't related, but it kind of looks like they are.



Hello, lovely colors!


Now the white version of these are in bloom, so of course I had to take lots of pictures of them like I did of the lavender ones the first time.


In the garden store I took more photos of the different spikes and decorative pieces.




There are lots of cool ways a person could photograph wedding rings at this garden. Anyone want to loan me theirs?





I think I warned you that I'd be taking more photos of the hearts. Since the first visit, tags had been added to each and every one of them, so my friend helped me temporarily remove them from the ones I was photographing. They were easy enough to put back on, so shush. 


We'll end with the odd man out. For the record, this style of tiling up photos with other photos or color blocks is not my idea (not that any of you thought so). I see it in various other photography blogs and copy. I'm such a biter! (Raise your hand if you are familiar with that term.) 

Thanks for looking. :)