Another American Adventure: more trees, hawks, and little flowers

Friday, May 3, 2013

more trees, hawks, and little flowers

Just a couple of days ago this tree up by the rabbit tree (see 2 posts down) was full of red buds. Now, like magic, it has blossomed into a fully white tree, no sign of red anywhere:

These are the 2 hawks who watch over everything around here ...

Little flowers decorate the (un-grassed) ground almost everywhere ...

... and color creeps into our brown stick forest ...

2 comments:

BarbaraMay 4, 2013 at 10:10 AM
I just LOVE that green haze in the tree canopy! It is what I see when I look out my window. I hope it lasts a little while longer.
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.