Category Archives: Flowers

At our offices (where I actually don’t have an office because I work from home but where I go in once a week or as needed because it’s only ten minutes away and it’s a long story for another day) they have these decorative shrubs all along the back of the parking lot.

I hadn’t really paid any attention to them – to the best of my recollection they’ve always just been your generic office parking lot landscaping green hedge shrub.

But now that spring is springing and everything’s doing their new growth dance, I see that all of the new growth here is this bright red, where all of the old leaves are still dark green.

There are also these flower or see buds scattered amongst the leaves.

The app tells me this is “Red Tip Photinia.” Okay. I’m not sure I see the “red tip” part, it looks like the whole leaves are either green wth no red or red with no green. But that’s probably why I’m not a botanist!

Whatever, I can see why it’s used for decorative landscaping. It’s wonderful!

I don’t know if this is a crabapple tree or some other kind of fruit.

Whatever it is, I’ve never seen any actual fruit on it in five years here.

But we do get these pretty pink flowers with all of these honkin huge “whiskers” (actually called “pistils” I think?) on them.

The bees and hummingbirds love them.

Today there are only the two blossoms, but give it a week or two, they’ll be everywhere!

The roses aren’t the only flowers starting to rouse for spring. I went around the side of the house and found this:

As with the roses, this bush has been trimmed back quite a bit by the gardeners over the winter. (After I took all of the Christmas lights off of it…) But the leaves have returned and with it, one pioneering, flaming red bloom.

The humming birds are regular visitors, not just to the feeders in the back yard, but to all of the blooming plants throughout the neighborhood.

In addition to the hibiscus and rose, across the street there are fruit trees (oranges, at least, possibly others) that are just covered in tiny white blossoms now. Not only are they all covered with bees (a great thing in its own right!) but the hummers are swarming all around the neighborhood.

Gotta love spring!

I had noticed this bud starting to grow over the last week, but when I went out today to get the mail I found that it had finally “popped!”

Classic form, perfect structure, beautiful color.

The only spot of color in a long row of roses that got cut back for the winter around the first of the year. Give it a couple of weeks, there will be roses of a half dozen different colors up and down the row. (When we find the “forever home,” I need to plant roses like this all along the driveway or by the front porch.)

Not noticed until I was going through the pictures for this post – a little friend hiding in the petals! Click on the image to blow it up to full-sized – can you find them?

The ash tree that had suddenly lost 90%+ of all of its leaves in the last week suddenly is exploding with new growth.

The brown, hard, barren branch endings now have soft green shoots…

…which have smaller shoots…

…which have smaller shoots and seed pods…

…which have smaller budding wannabe leaves.

It’s like a Mandelbrot set brought to life.

Or vice versa.

Perhaps it’s the lighting. Perhaps it’s the latest cold snap (it’s really not that cold) or rain (it hasn’t been that soggy) or something else. But the “big tree in the back yard,” which we’ve now pretty much decided must be some sort of ash tree, has gotten very confused. Or at least, one branch has, which is even more odd.

This particular tree will lose a bunch of leaves in the winter, but never all of them, and they never turn colors. They may fade a bit from bright green to a more pale green, but that’s it. Then they fall off. And the tree looks like this.

Except for this one branch. In the last 24 hours. At the wrong time of year.

Are we having some sort of aboreal  revolution here?

And even if we are, shouldn’t it have happened in October or November? Or maybe even December since we further south, maybe?

You know what? “Not my circus, not my monkeys!” Or in my case, “Not my float!”

It’s pretty in a subtle way. Yellows and browns and greens with just a touch of reddish shades here and there. And in the grey, rainy, gloomy, damp lighting of mid afternoon, it stands out.

YOU BE YOU, CONFUSED ASH!

After a week or more of fairly heavy rain that left everything well soaked, I had noticed a growth on our backyard tree that is almost certainly lichen.

The rain stopped early last week and it’s been dry for a few days. But the next storms are moving in (it’s raining now and we’re under yet another flash flood watch until Wednesday or so) so I took the opportunity this afternoon to take a look at the dried up lichen.

Several of these more colorful spots are still active.

A number of spots that were covered with the dark green lichen are now hard and white. All around the hard, white area in the center you can see areas of the “pock marks” that I think are structures of the lichen growths.

More flat, hard, white sections, surrounded by green pock marks.

There are also some new sections that have a reddish or pink tint.

Another pink-ish area, with lots of good detail on the “pock mark” areas.

We’ll see what the next round of rains bring out of these growth areas!