tilia

the dark green leaves and lime green bracts of the linden tree are a delight for the eyes right now. the bracts are an ingenious mechanism to carry the seeds away from the base of the tree when the time comes. these linden bracts, along with the fading spruce tips, mark the end of this season of new-growth citrine.  it’s one of my favorite colors. perhaps precisely because it only comes around for six weeks of the year, and then i won’t see it again until next april.  the older i get, the more i enjoy these once-a-year but only-for-a-short-time seasons. strawberries in june. blueberries in july. tomatoes in august. they are all worth the wait. and all the more delicious because of it.

linden leaves and bracts (tilia)

non-native

my 18 year old son’s high school graduation ceremony was yesterday. so, although many local wonders are happening outside right now (spruce tips, pine candles, linden bracts, irises, roadsides full of dame’s rocket, to name a few…) i photographed instead these very lovely, non-native, tropical protea flowers because they were in a vase on my kitchen counter where i put them three weeks ago when i bought them at the grocery in order to use some of the materials for making my son’s corsage and boutonnière for his high school prom. so, as you may have inferred from that long, run-on sentence, our house has been preoccupied as of late. you would think that the easiest thing for me to reach for under the circumstances would be the spruce tips in my back yard. but no, the closest things to hand were a pair of tropical protea blooms native to south africa. i’m sure that says something about the current state of the world. but i’m too preoccupied right now to figure it out.

protea flowers

rites of summer

clematis vines surround the door at my mom’s house. their late-may/early-june, blooms are a highly anticipated sign of summer for us. i did not pick this bud because of it’s sexual suggestion. it was merely the size and onion-dome shape that caught my attention. but now that i have taken this photo, it’s pretty much all i can see. even the finger-like tips at the crown look like the infundibulum of fallopian tubes. yet another reminder that all life is more alike than different.

clematis flower bud

yes, it snows in june

the cottonwood tree is one of our majestic hardwoods of the midwest. older trees can grow to have trunks 3 meters in diameter and 60 meters tall. in a mostly flat country, they can bee seen for miles, usually indicating that water is nearby. they hold a special place in the hearts of most midwesterners. the trees have begun to release the seeds from their spring catkins, which means it is once again snowing in minnseota. the cottony fluff looks and acts just like snow–softly falling on the breeze, covering sidewalks, driveways and windshields, and blowing into drifts at the edges of parking lots and roadsides. most people complain about the fluff catching on their screen doors. i, on the other hand, love the dissonance of such mighty trees releasing such tiny seeds.

cottonwood catkins with fluff (Populus deltoides)

spring into summer

my 18 year old son had his last day of high school on friday–his graduation another sign, along with the fading of wild geraniums, that summer is here. this one is more bittersweet than most, as i look back over the spring of his life, which i prepared the soil for, tended to, and fretted over for a couple of decades of my prime. now it is time for me to do what you do, when you do this right, and become helpfully obsolete, watching him take his first steps into summer.

wild geranium flowers (Geranium maculatum)