Musings

Taxus

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? 🤣 🤣 🤣

Wet and green

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).

Colorful Sunday

Lovely morning.

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

Still dripping and drippy, but not terribly windy.

Sun’s coming, two views

I looked behind me soon after I left the house on my dawn-ish walk and I saw the sun had almost arrived.

I rounded a couple of corners, tromp tromp, and I saw the almost-up sun illuminating the firehouse floor.

Achoo

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. 🤣 🤣 🤣

Lucky us

Peony color

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

April beauties

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.

Illusions and facts

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.

Gravity’s art

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

Context

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