Musings

Every spring these days, I find myself surprised at the yellowy green of the new growth…and then I forget to watch it transition to the dark green that the plant will sport for…well, for years, or, I think its lifetime.

The Botanist always called these types of evergreens Taxus, and I never thought anything about it—I simply internalized that these are Taxus. I just looked it up and that’s the genus (aha!), while the common name in English is yew. There’s plenty of variation among the Taxus species, so the most efficient name is…tada…Taxus, when you’re not sure which species you’re looking at. Ah, taxonomy.

Perhaps I should have saved this post for the 15th? 🤣 🤣 🤣

Posted at 9:31 PM | Comments Off on Taxus

The rain continued all night and into the morning, then stopped, then restarted for part of the afternoon. Yeesh. During that time, it seems like the trees did a huge amount of leafing out (this was when it was still raining and the fresh, new leaves were limp with precipitation weighting them down).

Posted at 9:40 PM | Comments Off on Wet and green

Lovely morning.

Rainy afternoon (this was at 1:41pm).

Still dripping and drippy, but not terribly windy.

Posted at 9:09 PM | Comments Off on Colorful Sunday

I can’t even bring myself to think about what all these shenanigans emanating from the White House are costing us, and I don’t mean money so much as good will and esteem, and things like that. Instead, I’ll think about the pollen count or something else that’s very positive. 🤣 🤣 🤣

Posted at 8:36 PM | Comments Off on Achoo

Here’s photo confirmation of color showing in our neighbor-peonies that we enjoy every time we stroll our driveway.

Posted at 9:56 PM | Comments Off on Lucky us

I’m honoring flower-season with today’s pictures. We have neighbors who have lovely banks/beds of flowering pretties, like this.

Here’s an azalea carpet, but it isn’t a carpet because it’s mostly the top of the shrubbery…actually, a whole line of foundation-planting shrubberies in front of an institutional building…not in our neighborhood.

Posted at 8:12 PM | Comments Off on April beauties

When I look down from my bedroom in the dark hours, this azalea looks like a snow bank.

Speaking of weather, we may hit 90°F by the end of the work-week, but next week is predicted to have days that don’t reach 60°F. Yikes.

Posted at 9:34 PM | Comments Off on Illusions and facts

A windy, rainy storm came through, and the trees dropped a mini-forest of green bits.

Posted at 10:14 PM | Comments Off on Gravity’s art

This is the kind of snowballs we have around here these days. (I think it’s a kind of viburnum.)

Posted at 9:55 PM | Comments Off on Context

I found full-out dogwoods today, and had my first sighting of yellow pine pollen dried puddle rims…that is: pine pollen that’s yellow, and not (as far as I know) the pollen of yellow pines.

Posted at 10:42 PM | Comments Off on Dogwood blooms