Another American Adventure: leafing

Sunday, April 29, 2012

leafing

The budding stage is mostly over, and most everything has moved into active unfurling and leafing! Here are some photos from a picnic hike we took this morning at Moraine Lake State Park. A beautiful, sunny day. Cool in the morning, but warming up by noon.

The dogwood seems to be on its way out, so I wanted to catch a photo of the flowers while they are here.

4 comments:

BarbaraApril 29, 2012 at 4:38 PM
I love your photos of life springing forth. We are more or less at the same stage here. I mourn the loss of the female pear tree in our backyard. It used to be covered in white flowers and then heavy with fruit in summer.
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beth cioffolettiApril 30, 2012 at 5:33 AM
it's a beautiful thing to behold this 2nd year in a row, Barbara. I think it reassures me at some deep level that life does not end, but is continually reborn.
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BarbaraApril 30, 2012 at 8:39 AM
That luscious pink bud spray ... do you know what it is? redbud? I saw redbud in Missouri when I was in grad school, but I don't think it grows around here.
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beth cioffolettiApril 30, 2012 at 9:57 AM
I don't know what it is, Barbara. John thought it was pink dogwood (not yet opened), but I don't think so. The dogwood bloom isn't clustered like that.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.