The Khousa Dogwoods (Cornus Khousa) have been spectacular along the coast this year, where Spring has been on the cool and rainy side. I don’t remember a year with blossoms so magnificent and the trees looking so healthy. There’s a particularly nice stretch heading west out of the center of Madison, where a number of stately colonials provide a backdrop.
This hasn’t so much been the case with other dogwoods; I notice the pink and reddish flowered ones (Cherokee Brave/Cherokee Princess – Cornus Florida) have hardly flowered at all, and have long since gone by.
Not sure who the young fan is, but the musician is longtime Vermonter Steve Spensley, playing at the Brattleboro Area Farmer’s Market some years ago.
Got me thinking of the title of that old German folk song, “Music Alone Shall Live” – there’s a nice reggae version here – which became the motto for the Iron Horse music venue in Northampton, MA.
I returned here a few days after taking this photo, at about the same time of the day, and the backlight on the smoke bush was again spectacular.
A man was standing where I had been, clutching a large drawing pad and furiously sketching the scene before it shifted. His concentration was such that I felt a little bad even saying hello, and apologizing for walking into the scene briefly to ID the yellow flowers in the foreground. “Oh I can work around you..”
Turns out they’re coreopsis, surrounded by milkweed and white columbine.
There’s some beautiful columbine that just showed up in our back yard this year, “volunteers” in gardening world parlance. Here’s the darkest one, with mostly a deep purple coloration, but there’s also a lavender one, and a cream one.
They’ve been part of a second wave of blossoms this spring, arriving along with the rhododendrons and Virginia spiderwort; after the apple tree, lilacs, bleeding heart and bridal wreath spirea, and just before the cascading weigela at the edge of the woodpile.
From a performance at The Kate in Old Saybrook, CT, on April 18, 2019. Went with two old compadres, JA and JG; hard to say which of us enjoyed it the most, though I’ll give a slight edge to JG, who grew up in Texas, where these gals were raised.
Three years ago, we picked up this young 4-1 apple tree (four types of apples grafted on a single root stock), and have had perhaps 15-20 apple starts each year, though the harvest was much less. In each of those years, there didn’t seem to be many bees around when the tree was blossoming.
This year, I thought I might help out with the pollination, but shortly after I went out with a q-tip, this bumblebee came by, and put me to shame. (S)he probably visited about thirty blossoms in the first couple of minutes, and didn’t linger on any one for much longer than five seconds. In looking at close-ups later, I saw the evolutionary wisdom of the natural world: pollen scattered over nearly every part of her body. So … as long as there are bees …
