OMG, I thought I might have a chance at this one, but the bar is so high already. 
This is where I went hiking yesterday. As you can see, there was no shortage of subjects for this month’s theme, even though I didn’t know it was this month’s theme yet.
And an alterative picture of the same bee on different flowers, that I almost picked for my entry.
Stunning.
That’s not a bee!
It’s a moth, that mimics a bumblebee:
Ah, cool! I didn’t think it quite looked like a bee, but I assumed it was a species of bee I was unfamiliar with.
I mean, that’s just showing off.
Yeah. I set the thread up, wandered off for an hour and came back to a bunch of great photos. 
I think it’s going to be a good one, and it’s probably an easier theme for those who want to go out and shoot to the brief.
Dude. That one is fabulous!!
My daughter works in a greenhouse and took this picture a couple of days ago.
Wild iris with Orton effect
@zyada Very nice. Did you mean to put it in the competition thread?
(ETA: I somehow managed to make this post a reply to @snowthx which wasn’t my intention. Sorry for the unwarranted notification!)
I managed to get out and take some shots specifically for the competition yesterday, which was fun. Haven’t reviewed them properly yet though.
I thought it would be fun to get some camera chat going in here, and to that end I wanted to talk about my Fuji X100T, which I call my hipster camera.
The X100T was in some ways a ridiculous thing to buy. It has a fixed non-zoom 35mm equivalent lens. To put that another way, you can’t swap the lens out and you can’t zoom (I joke that it has high-powered bipedal zoom - you walk closer to the thing you want to photograph).
Given that I already had a Fuji mirrorless camera with interchangeable lenses, why would I buy such a limited thing? I find that with zoom lenses, I’m lazy. I stand in one spot and compose with the zoom. Having a single focal length makes me think much more about the composition, which in turn leads to better photos. Restrictions often lead to better art. It’s been interesting taking it out and finding ways to get good shots within its limits. There will always be shots I won’t get - especially things far away, but I’ve found that the consideration a single focal length demands means there are shots I wouldn’t have got with my zoom, as well. It slows me down, which isn’t always a bad thing.
Too late for my tulips and too early for my irises. But I did go out and take these pictures today, which is very good as I don’t leave my house so often these days. I do have many, many pictures of flowers. Most likely I’ll pick on of a favorite flower and not the best technical picture.
Spring is making the ferns come back to life:
Not a flower, strictly speaking, but I love those spirals. Will look for a real flower to post.
So this month states it’s “Flowers” (plural) but everything I’ve seen so far is of a single flower; are flowers (multiple) allowed?
Not knowing about the theme, we went to a tulip festival yesterday morn; haven’t even had a chance to look at what I took yet.
Single flowers are fine. 
We’ve also had “animals” and “skies” - the plural just seems to work better as a title.
I’ll keep saying this as well - the themes should be interpreted however you like. I’m not planning on gatekeeping any entries. If you post a picture of your dog this month and then claim it’s name is Poppy, that’s fine by me (you might not get any votes though). 
D’oh!..
Here is a noob question for the real photographers out there. I was going to enter in this month’s competition a nice alpine photo of some flowers and a granite peak, but went with the poppies I recently encountered.
Anyway, I was wondering how to determine portrait or landscape mode? What criteria do you think about? It’s easy enough to snap some pics in each mode, but if you were to frame or enter a photo in a contest, how do you decide?
For example - this landscape version captures the whole scene well enough…
But in portrait mode, it seems more intimate (and works better on the lock screen of my phone):
Is there more to this than what pleases my eye?
I’m no expert myself, but I think the choice of landscape versus portrait basically comes down to what looks better for that scene. In your case, I lean to the landscape version, although both are nice.
In the landscape, the mountains are the subject. In the portrait, the flowers are.
(More or less).