That is quite an extraordianary Render my friend!
The Labor of Love can truly be seen! The colors and the whole "construction" of the Image is extremely well done!!!

This is totally AWESOME. Wish I could be there!!! Thank you for having the patience to create this magnificent piece of art and for sharing it with us.

Simply Beautiful!! This must be where the butterflies are truly free:)

What an excellent render! Love the composition and it is very well executed by you. Saved&faved!

Very attractive desktop, as always! The background, (with the mountains and clouds) are the very best part of the composition... your forte! The foreground flowers (and the juniper) look a little on the harsh side, and need to be blended in to fit with the softness of the background. The oak tree looks very real... nice object. My Bryce trees look nothing like that, and the only tree I'm allowed to use in Vue at the moment is the dead tree... so I look on in envy. :-)

Thanks for the nice feedback from everyone.

Tootles is right. I was more interested in filling the foreground with color than making everything harmonious. The populator makes it possible to create millions, or billions, of copies of a single object and changing the scale and scattering variables, make a convincing forest, or a rocky beach, or a flowery meadow. The growth and branching behavior of the trees is very finely modeled and they grow together with the other plants into a realistic and intertwined ecology. The software is quite capable of photorealistic results, but as a beginner I'm only using a fraction of its potential.

Tootle's, you may want to try Vue as your next step up in rendering. The Pioneer version is a free download too.
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_8_pioneer/

Thanks, Russ :-) I got a free version of Vue Frontier 8 from a magazine, but haven't used it as much as I would like to. The landscapes look more realistic than the Bryce ones. I have been using flat pictures in Bryce too (otherwise it would all be trees, mountains, boolean objects and clouds), and they have their problems.

I love the idea of trees being 'grown'... I came across that a while ago where plants are concerned; I can't remember the software, but I never got around to trying. I don't think it was Xfrog, though.