Freeze Warning!

Give me a break! I mean, really.

A Letter to a Friend

Dear S,

I love the Cambridge garden photos you post, and the beautiful prints that your Iowa artist friend creates of trees, and animals, and flowers. I only wish I could grow such beautiful things, either in the soil or on the page.

Once a year, though, I think of myself as a gardener, or a forester, in spring when the flowering trees I planted all bloom: crabapple, Kwanzan cherry, dogwood, redbud. 

I made these few snaps for you today, just so you can see what are missing here.

I hope your spring is just as beautiful!

Your friend,
R

Southern Prep

Spent Kwanzan cherry blossoms litter the weedy, clover-filled yard: it's been a Lilly Pulitzer kind of spring.

Celebrate Spring

now because the end is in sight: 20s and ice pellets. Tuesday's forecast.

Tonight, may I dream of white crabapple blossoms and green bees, my two dogwoods just bleaching from green to white, the redbud -- all blossom and no leaf, the Kwanzan cherry with its fluffy flowers.

And the perfumed air. A long wait for a small reward.

Ruffles

If Ruffles have ridges, then cherry blossoms have ruffles.

Aren't they delicious?

The Color of a Cherry

When I planted a Kwanzan cherry tree in my front yard in 2002, I never knew that it would thrill me twice a year. Every spring I enjoy the cotton-candy pink fluffy flowers. They're crimped and floppy like unstarched petticoats nodding from heavy waists as if wilting. In late summer, I get a second show (that is, when the birds don't get to the tree first): the beautiful little clumps of cherries clinging to their fragile stems and each other for sun and ripening.
What I love most about the tree and its fruit is the show of colors -- in spring from pale pink to powder-pink to girlie-pink to poodle-skirt pink to full-on fuchsia mixed with apple green and painfully blue sky and in late summer from insect-eaten emerald green to forest green to chartreuse and splotchy red like a kiss deepening from a blush to bloody passion.

It's a good tree, I think. It's a beautiful companion, I know.