Friday, May 24, 2013

Sun! Color! Green Stuff!


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.