Another American Adventure: budding is getting complicated ...

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

budding is getting complicated ...

4 comments:

BarbaraApril 24, 2013 at 2:22 PM
It is 21 C (70 C) today and kind of humid because rain is expected tonight. Feels almost like summer here. Must sound funny to you. It is almost uncomfortably warm after our winter this year. Buds are still in their beginning phase here. From your photos, looks like I have lots to look forward to.
ReplyDelete
Replies
Paul HowardApril 25, 2013 at 4:25 AM
Thanks so much for sharing these, Beth.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

"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.