Throughout the neighborhood (including across my own front yard), Bradford pear trees are in bloom. Their flowers are a brilliant white, with a perfume, well, something like a cross between slaking concrete and ammonia. They are perhaps best admired from a distance — in this case, along Piney Woods Church Road. Beyond the Bradford pear, a maple tree is in bloom. Spring is only a week away.
I have more signs of spring to share, after another outing to a nearby public garden yesterday. Left to right and top to bottom: magnolia, windflower, trout lilies, cherry blossom, crocus, daffodils.
On yet another rainy, wintery afternoon, with the air temperature struggling to rise above 40, and the wind chill in the lower 30s, I started off down Piney Woods Church Road hoping to discover something new — some further omen of spring’s return. I was delighted to find, almost immediately, more red maples in bloom — this time, a couple of trees growing near the intersection with Rico Road. I snapped a number of photos of them. Upon returning home, I was most drawn to my images of this particular cluster of flowers. Alas, a dead stalk of some kind of large weed in the background provided an annoying distraction in every single shot. So I broke with tradition, trudging back a second time to take the photograph below.
The daffodils are still in bloom along Piney Woods Church Road, and more seem to be popping up every day. I find them intriguing, because even though they are so commonplace, they have an unusual feature, the corona, whose origin was not known to science until 2013. Just last year, researchers from the University of Oxford published a scientific paper in the Journal of Plant Science, indicating that the corona has evolved as a modification of the stamens of the flower.
Outside the Day Butterfly Center, a Japanese star magnolia tree was coming into bloom in the late afternoon light.
Late in the winter here in Chattahoochee Hills, henbit bursts into bloom, peppering the grassy verges with flecks of pinkish-purple. A member of the mint family whose original habitat is in Europe, western Asia and northern Africa, henbit has become common to roadsides across the United States. It seems ubiquitous on the untreated lawn, but its reign is short-lived. It appears as a harbinger of spring here in Georgia, then slowly fades away after the first day of spring.
In the woods along Piney Woods Church Road, the red maple trees are in bloom; gazing through the forest, I can see the red haze that marks their presence. A couple of young maples happen to grow along the road edge near Hutcheson Ferry Road, and their open blossoms betoken spring’s arrival, though the calendar (and the current weather forecast) would argue otherwise.
It is a frenetic time of year along Piney Woods Church Road. Blink, and buds open, trees burst into flower, spring arrives….
This is another image from my daffodil photo-shoot earlier today. The sun was low in the sky, shining through the corona, as if the daffodil had captured the sunlight within its core.
I set out for Piney Woods Church late on a sunny afternoon, with one goal in mind. A daffodil beside a fence at the road edge was finally in bloom (I had scoped it out on a dog walk a short time before). My goal was to find a way to photograph it that would make it interesting. Dandelions and daffodils are much-welcomed signs of spring; they are also ubiquitous, floral equivalents of pigeons in a city square.
I spent half an hour with that daffodil, using my plus four and plus ten macro lenses. I took over sixty photos. I am not even sure which one I was using for the one below — the plus ten, I think. It is my favorite shot — and angle one rarely gets to take in a botanical garden, lying down and gazing upward.
