Plant Life Abounds #Sunday Stills

While there are a few places on earth that can’t host plant life, there are many more unexpected or surprising to me locations to discover a tree or shrub happily rooted in place. Not just barely hanging on, but even thriving. Thriving plants and me don’t typically coexist. However, someday, I hope to host a thriving garden, The photo blog theme this week is Plant Life especially plants and the great outdoors.

Plants in Unexpected Place

Here are a few places where we stumbled into unexpected plant life. I was surprised at what would grow in sand, lava flows and very small crevices along a granite faced canyon.

Our country’s landscape is very diverse and it’s always exciting to be in a new environment and simply take in the new environment and sometimes odd plant life.

Plants for the Animals

Plants serve our own lively hood as well as those who call the animal kingdom home. Four of these critters are nearby on our property. The chickens in the tree are from a Hawaiian trip. Hawaiian surprised me with the amount of free roaming chickens. But these chickens in a tree still makes me chuckle.

The deer are from one of our many treks to Wyoming. Although, we do see deer in southern Idaho, we don’t notice them often right around the property. The other critters from the skunks (yes, we’ve seen 3 playing together), the barn cats aka mousers, along with bugs and butterflies accounts for much of our animal life around the house.

I’ll also add the neighbors horses as our other primary animal life. This is definitely horse country and we’re surrounded by both horses, cows and agriculture.

The Great Outdoors & Trees Everywhere

I love trees and the more the merrier until you get tired of cleaning up after them! Truthfully, I’d never trade the tree maintenance for less trees especially in the summer heat. Now, that I’m in a multi-season climate zone, there’s more tree work than ever. The life and peacefulness being surrounded by these leafy giants makes it worth the effort. Here’s a view from the street to the new building aka shouse spanning fall to summer seasons.

Plants as Food

We’ve had time to dive into a food garden yet, I can admit to enjoy the fruits of my yard(s). We have a handful of fruit trees here and we have 25+ citrus trees back at the previous residence. This spring I’m experimenting with two young tomato plants. The tomatoes are getting too tall and will soon need to survive getting transplanted.

Plants in the wild

Enough about plants in my backyard. Here’s a few of my favorite plant life snaps in a few remote areas. Discovering something interesting on the trail and creating a memory via my camera makes for a successful outdoor hike, jeep ride, and even backpacking trip.

That’s all for now. Next week, I’ll add in a shouse building update.

About the Photo Challenge

A weekly themed photo challenge hosted by Terri. Check out her Blog and come back to visit for more SundayStills and traveling posts!

More Sunday Still Posts

Thanks for visiting our travel blog and I hope you enjoyed finding the #SundayStills Challenge. You can join the weekly challenge by visiting our hosts blog Second Wind Leisure. and checking out Terri’s post for this week, Plant Life in the Great Outdoors.