Saturday, May 19, 2007

Flowers, cont.

This a shrub called wygelia, though I'm not sure that's how it's spelled. (I could check, but hey - that would be wrong, right?)

This is a shrub, of course. It has LOADS of flowers, and they're quite vivid. (The colors aren't as vivid on the web.)












Finally, not a flower, but one of our gigantic hostas. I love these. The leaves are huge, as you tens of readers can see in the contrast between my (admitedly very, very small) hand and the leaf.

Lovely plants.

Eventually I'll get back to that ed stuff ... but these are such nice plants.


More flowering plants

I neglected to mention that the reason my last entry was late was because the flowering trees pictured had actually bloomed a couple of weeks ago - I just didn't get them up. The flowers here, though, are from today - they're current flowers. I'm sure you tens of readers will appreciate that.
So: Here









and here:










are two horse chestnuts. They have different color flowers, as you can see. I took these from the car - pretty good, huh? They're on the east end of our street, Washington St., by the U of Michigan.

Here are some more flowering things from our yard.

I know this is kind of out of focus, but I wanted to show how the flowers are actually different colors. Some are more purple, some are more pink. Cool! Here's an in-focus, but not as close up, view.









This is a tree at our neighbor's house.
It's very cool. The leaves are sort of edged in pink, as below. I like that these very colorful trees grow here.

I have other pictures from our backyard, but for some reason blogger has pooped out on letting me put more photos in here - perhaps too many in this post. So will put those in another post, right away... because I'm sure people are DYING to see them.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Blooming trees of Ann Arbor - a very late post!


It's FINALLY spring here in SE Michigan. (Yes, it was only the high 50s today ... but that's part of spring.) Anyway - one of the virtues of living here are the lovely blooming trees. Sure, there are blooming trees in other places - in MN, for example, we had flowering crabs, etc. But there seem to be more here than in MN, and certainly more than we had when I was growing up in New Mexico. So - I have taken pictures of a few of my favorite flowering crabapple trees, which I now offer to the tens of readers. I only wish I could include the lovely smell. May I say, too, that it was my *intent* to take pictures of the other lovely blooming trees; I just haven't gotten to it. Right now, for ex., the horse chestnuts are blooming. They have very cool flowers that extend straight up in the air from the branches, and lots of them. If you do an image search you can find photos, but it's not the same as seeing one from the ground.

The image up at the top here is of Vesper Street, which is just to the northwest of our house. The whole length of Vesper is planted with flowering crabs. How lovely is *that*?


This second photo, to the right, is on Edgewood, which to the south of us about 3/4 mile. It's at the top of Wurster Park in Ann Arbor, and Wurster Park is just down the street from Washtenaw Dairy, which is a VERY IMPORTANT PLACE because it is *the* place to go for ice cream. I am a very big fan of ice cream, as the tens of readers doubtless know. I will say here, for posterity, that when I die I would like everyone who comes to whatever event is held to observe my life to have ice cream. However, I diverge from the subject of flowering trees.

Here is the flowering crabapple tree in our backyard. The flowers on our tree are paler than the ones on the Edgewood tree, but they're still really pretty.

FYI, here is a picture of the back of our house. It's a little top-heavy, our house. It was cloudy the day I took this photo (the same day I took the one of our tree). But it's a very nice backyard, and a very nice house.

So - this is my post about the blooming trees. Next time, back to the less lovely, but very engaging, things I'm thinking about...