Thank you berry much

Mom and I went on our adventure this morning - just the two of us. We went to MY 'little' park (the one with the tree top board walk. It also has a nature center, a butterfly garden and a 'native garden".  Here I am in the native garden area - which is really cool as all the plants have name tags which makes it so much easier to find them at the plant store if you really like them.

Anyway, the other day when we were there Mom saw this beautiful purple flower, (her camera battery died so she couldn't get a photo of it then)  it is so soft and feels just like velvet. Mom wanted to find out what it was and after a bit of searching we found it's name tag. This gorgeous plant is the Mexican Sage bush. Here are the flowers close up and then you can see the whole bush.  We don't know if it is an edible type of sage but it sure is pretty and the butterflies love it.

The other thing we saw lots of today was berries. I told Mom I was berry happy we were having an adventure by ourselves today :)  We saw berries that were purple, red, orange and white. The branches were so heavy with them they were just about hitting the ground. I guess they are not tasty berries though as the birds didn't seem to take any interest in them.

It got Mom and I to thinking that these would probably have been the types of berries that native Indians would of used many years ago to make dyes for cloth. We did notice that all the berries were very hard (which is probably why the birds don't like them). That means if anyone was going to use them they would probably of had to boil them and then the color might of come out.  It sounds good in theory :)

 And finally - the thing Mom had been waiting to see - a beautiful tree in its fall colors. Silly Mom - if she had looked in our own back yard she would of seen that MY special tree - an October Blush Maple is turning red too!  Mom says we often miss what is right under our noses.