Nature is Never Spent

In the right slant of light, some of the maple trees are as pretty as the pear trees in bloom, only they're hung all over with bright red helicopter seeds.

Back at the park with the tall trees today, and I continue to be enchanted by the light. It's also hinting at spring: when you can see the woods from far away, some of the trees are tinged with red, some with pale green, as if they were turned upside down and just the tips of the twigs dipped in thin paint. It's the buds and the little winged seeds coming on.

Spring storms a-comin'. Last night I kept turning up the space heater, and today the air conditioning, which isn't set very low, came on while I was at work. Pressure dropped, temperature climbed, air got deadly muggy. We'll see what happens. When people make small talk about the weather around here, it's mostly, "I wish it would make up its mind!" I know that happens everywhere, but for us the seasonal dissociative identity disorder is whiplash-inducing from about November through May.



The trees in the shrubby hedge area where I park are hackberries, I think. I have to remember from last summer, because the bark is hard to see and the leaves and little berries are the best identifiers. Right now the twigs are covered with tiny red buds. They make the branches high above look lacy, and when the buds really burst their waxy little coverings, the coverings fall and litter the roof and windows of my car. If we could collect enough of them, I bet they'd make a decent mulch.

One more post about the snow, until it snows again. (It will if my wishes have anything to do with it! And apparently in a local news poll, 58% of my fellow area residents said they would rather see more winter than get on with spring.)

It's always a pleasant shock to see how different the ground and general landscape looks when it's covered with white, but the lovely thing is, the more you look, the more you keep seeing surprises, things looking like they're covered with sugar frosting. The squirrel drey, the azalea bushes, and every one of the sweetgum balls hanging like Christmas balls from the tree outside my apartment, for example.

And at the same time the sweetgum balls have little snow caps, just above them are the green buds getting ready to bust open.

A pretty big tornado came through about a year and a half ago. My parents' house wasn't damaged, thank goodness (many people lost their homes) but several large trees came down. One of them was a tall pine in the front yard, maybe 40 years old. With all the cleanup in the area, it was a few months before there was anyone available to come cut it up and haul it away, but now it's just a stump and some pulled-up roots. I've had plans to plant another tree there.

When I went to visit the spot again this winter, though, I discovered that Nature can take care of herself. Of course. There are already at least three young pines growing out of the mound of the former tree's roots.

We have a variety of winter berries coming on now: laurel, privet, and of course holly. I love the different colors.



Privet starts with blossoms like this in May and the little green berries come on like this in September.

I step on and around acorns all the time in the fall, all shapes and sizes: oblong, round, dark brown, light brown, green, white seedmeat, bright orange seedmeat, yellow seedmeat, the size of small marbles to bigger than banty hen eggs. Sometimes the acorns fall with their caps on, though they may lose them once they hit the ground; sometimes they leave their caps attached to the tree and fall bare-headed.





I was listening to a radio program today about what causes balsam fir trees to drop their needles after they're cut down. (It has to do with ethylene.) I wonder if there's some identifiable scientific reason some acorns fall cap and all, and others leave the cap behind. I should observe more closely to see if perhaps the different varieties of oaks have different rates.

I was downtown this morning. I don't go there often, but it's really quite pleasant in an urban way. The buildings are attractive, especially the older ones, and there are a lot of well cared for trees on the street. And nowhere is far from the river, which is bordered by parks. If I worked down there I think I'd go to the park for lunch any day the weather was good.



One tree I don't see much in other places (i.e. non-urban) is the ginkgo. Such an amazing tree, really. It has survived since at least as far back as the Jurassic, from before the angiosperms. It has no close living relatives and reproduces more like ferns than like other seed plants. It has fan-shaped leaves that are unique in their non-networked vein pattern. The veins just splay out from the stem. I remember learning in early elementary school that cities liked these trees because they tolerate pollution and improve the air. (It was the kind of fact I would have seized on. How often did I get to hear about trees in school? Not often enough.) They're also disease- and insect-tolerant, and they can be so lovely in the fall. The leaves of the ones I see are an even, pure yellow.

After the storm and wind of Thursday, Friday dawned frosty and clear, with some of the trees having been blown free of their last leaves.

With the summer green and blossoms of the trees gone, some of them turned red, I've been noticing greens I never notice in summer: moss on black oak bark, ivy growing all over a cherry trunk that's usually surrounded by crepe myrtle branches.