This has been an unusually beautiful spring around here. The
numbers of flowering trees has been dazzling.
We’ve always had flowering crab trees, dogwood and the occasional
redbud. But now, everywhere you look, there’s color, something we used to see,
in terms of bright colors, only in the fall.
Behind the science building on campus there are a bunch of
magnolias of all things. They were by a cou0le of folks in the botany division
of the biology department. They don’t bloom vigorously every year, but my friend
Tom took me up to see them once during a particularly spectacular display a few
years ago.
Unlike the colorful fall season, these delicate flowering
trees don’t last very long. They are, however replaced by lilacs and now the
rhododendrons, which are much flashier than the early spring trees.
We didn’t have a very harsh winter this year, but we were
rewarded with a beautiful spring anyway.
