April Drama

(Postscript added at bottom)

April begins with 'forsythia madness'...tall spires of yellow against a blue, blue sky...

I've lived where I do since early 1989 and every spring I tell myself I'm going to stop and

take a picture when the forsythia are in bloom around our township center, about 3 blocks

from my house...this year (2007) I did...

All the above forsythia are from that huge border around our township building

And the pear trees, beginning as green and pale pink, push their way onward into white

Some days in early April are damp with last night's raindrops still clinging to the evergreens

...and have a serene beauty all their own in the misty morning

My old lilacs leaf out and as I take this picture I am reminded of the same shot I took

below on Valentine's

Even the lilac branch at the end of my sidewalk has straightened enough from the weight of

ice below so that it will not need to be removed after all.

Daffodils that a mere two weeks ago were poking through the snow, have burst happily

into full bloom...these two pictures are of the same area. That's the base of the trumpet

vine at the top of each.

On my smaller porch, pots of ranunculus wait in the sunlight

Melanie comes on Tues. the 3rd to help uncover buried stepping stones amongst the daffodils

and though it's 6 in the evening when I took this picture, she's comfortably dressed like this.

And in days up in the 70's, everything is delighting in the spring

... the world is filled with daffodils

The purple magnolia begins to bud

and in less than two days its color is on display

gloriously pinky/purple against the blue

But...then...winter returns on April 4th... a mere two days after the forsythia pictures were

taken on April 2nd

The temperatures go down into the low 20's night after night and by the second day of that,

the magnolia begins to show the wear of it

The daffodils, stronger in their nature, hold on longer, but after 2 days even they begin

to tilt toward the earth.  A robin sits in the trumpet vine stalk, wondering where spring went.

But at least it looks much less uninviting than it did on Valentine's

...though then there were no daffodils to bend low with cold

and let their yellow faces finally press into the brownness below

and lie as though stepped upon atop the remnants of old maple leaves

So that by Easter morning on the 8th, the magnolia is reduced to this

forsythia to this

and what looked like this on Tuesday

looked like this on Easter Sunday

But there were some who managed still to hold their heads above the ground...

there are always, ever...some...who do.

And inside, safe and warm, flowers of another sort...are fine.

BACK TO JO'S OTHER PLACE

POSTSCRIPT ADDED APRIL 12, 2007

EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE FIRST PICTURES ABOVE WERE TAKEN, I WENT

BACK TO THE FORSYTHIA ROW AND THE PEAR TREE AND TOOK A COUPLE

OF NEW SHOTS TO SHOW THE CONTRASTS. AH, THE DIFFERENCE A WEEK MAKES!

This pear by the township building (forsythias in background) actually fared fairly well.

In general, though, the many, many Bradford pears that are in bloom here now have

much more brown to them.

On my magnolia, as sad as it looks, you can see there are some buds that were too small

to be in bloom last week and I expect there will be a few more blooms that will come out

later.

A number of the daffodils are holding their heads up somewhat better. The ones that

lay flat, though, remain flat.

These were the ones I used as an example of daffs that didn't lie all the way down.

Here they are from the front the morning of the 12th, looking pretty good!!

And this brave little primrose looked just like this on the 3rd AND on the 12th.

AND NOW A POST-POSTSCRIPT! The purple magnolia tried a second flush of blooms,

so that the new ones were there among the crisp, black remains of the old...

So this is what it looked like on April 27, 2007.

The tree itself, of course, is perfectly all right. This is it at the end of May.