Love the peaceful feeling of both images! This is achieved through your choice of a very wide aperture. For intimate closeups like these, going with a shallow depth of field is best. Imagine if the backgrounds were in focus. There would be a lot of unnecessary detail in the images, and the images would look amateurish (because armatures don’t know how to change the focus point or change their settings to get DOF). Also, if the entire scene was in focus, the minute details of your subjects would be lost, crowded out by all the other details in the shot. So all that to say, nice DOF.
In the first shot, I agree wholeheartedly with @TimTam about seeing the top of the plant, and @Nasa about it being faked. You should be able to do this in Lightroom with some precision brushing. However, it would be very easy to do in Photoshop, if you have it. As for composition, I feel that there isn’t enough of the plan in the image. I like the convergence of background lines to the plant; it’s just there’s just too much blurry background on the left side of the picture. I would have zoomed in a little more. Also, notice that the left side of the plan forms a very strong vertical line? It seems to be splitting the picture in half. I know it’s impossible to flip that plant around, but it would look a whole lot nicer if the diagonal side of the plant was facing into the frame.
As for the second shot, I’m afraid it is very much out of focus. Camera shake. A tripod was needed. A tripod would have allowed you to choose an ISO with less noise too. Have you experimented with the noise reduction sliders in Lightroom? I read this thread the other day on both sharpening and noise reduction: http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/27083/recommended-start-point-for-sharpening-raw-images