nature’s confetti

When you are reading this I will be flying back from doing a workshop for a corporate client in Florida. When I do these workshops I often bring a bag or two of dried botanicals with me for the workshop participants to play with while I talk. By the end of the workshop, this confetti is often all that will be left behind. But even that is gorgeous. Nature does it best.

crushed dried botanical bits

leaf out!

After Monday’s soaking rain, most of the trees have now had bud burst and early leaf out. Except the oaks of course. Those guys always wait to go last. Their such pikers.

bud burst and baby maple leaves

tight in the bud

This vine looks dead for intents and purposes, but the those new spring buds give it away. A few feet further down this vine, the buds had already burst and were leafing out showing tiny grape clusters. But I liked the tendrils better on this section. You know how I am about tendrils.

wild grapevine with old tendrils and new buds

P.S. Happy May Day everyone! Make a posie and put it on your neighbors doorstep.

abundance

It is hard to communicate in a single image the sheer abundance of even a single tree of crab-apple blossoms. Think Washington DC or Kyoto, Japan during cherry blossoms. That is Minneapolis/St. Paul during apple blossom season.

crab apple blossoms

Two words: Apple. Blossoms.

It’s apple blossom season here in the North! We have a lot of apple trees, which means we have a lot of trees loaded with pink and white blossoms. It’s pretty spectacular. We had 24 hours of rain yesterday, and that was clearly the memo all the trees were waiting for, because when I ran to the grocery store around noon today my world looked entirely different than it had only the day before. It doesn’t always work this way–all the trees blooming on the exact same day. But it sure is fun when it does happen!

crabapple blossoms