Colorado may be burning, but it’s also blooming. July kicks off wildflower season in the Rockies; in a place of perpetual photo opps, it’s one of the most beautiful times to visit.
Crested Butte’s annual Wildflower Festival is July 9-12, and includes over 80 hikes, 4×4 backcountry tours, and photography, gardening and cooking classes. If you can’t make a trip out, enjoy these photos of Colorado wildflowers at their most photogenic.
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April showers bring May flowers, as the saying goes. We’re getting plenty of rain this month in Turkey, but we’ve had flowers. April is the big month for tulips in Istanbul, and you can see them planted all over town as 11.5 million were planted for this year’s season. I took today’s photo at Emirgan Park, one of the prime viewing spots of the Istanbul Tulip Festival. There are over 100 varieties planted in Emirgan Park alone, many in interesting patterns like the nazar evil eye, a major symbol of Turkish superstition.
You probably associate tulips with Holland, but it was Ottoman Turks who first cultivated them and introduced them to the Dutch in the 17th century. Today, Turkey is trying to reclaim the flower, growing millions of tulips with a goal of becoming an exporter again by 2014. Along with fresh flowers, you can see the influence of the tulip in the shape of the Turkish tea glasses, and as legend has it, the shape of the sultan’s turbans.
Have a springtime photo to share with us? Add it to the Gadling Flickr pool for our next Photo of the Day.
This Sunday marks the Easter Holiday in much of the world, and worshippers everywhere are marking the day with uniquely local traditions. As evidence check out this photo taken by Flickr user Aldaberto.H.Vega in Honduras. As part of Semana Santa locals lay out brilliant “carpets” on the streets composed of colorful sawdust and flowers documenting the Stations of the Cross. The Gadling team liked the eye-catching visuals of the scene so much that fellow blogger Meg Nesterov used almost exactly the same image in a photo during Easter 2011. Seems like quite a sight to see, whether you’re a practicing Christian or simply curious about the world.
Have any great photos to share from your own travels? Why not upload them to our Gadling group on Flickr? We might just pick one of yours as our Photo of the Day.
Somewhere in your imagination, there’s a valley like this one, its verdant slopes carpeted with a bursting red patchwork of flowers. Except, in this case, the valley is real. Photo of the Day regular jrodmanjr found this amazing patch of red clover while exploring Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The image’s visual appeal is intensified by the macro focus on a single bunch of the colorful plants in the foreground, a blurred field or red dots stretching as far as the eye can see in the background. Beautiful.
Have any great travel photos to share with the world? Why not add them to our Gadling group on Flickr? We might just pick one of yours as our Photo of the Day.