Scenes from Spring: Reprise

New Beginnings:

Spring comes upon us with the emergence of color after the long colorless winter.  These tiny yellow flowers often poke up through the snow as our very first sign of Spring. Winter seems so forever gray.  I almost give up each year and resign myself to a colorless world.  And then just before I give up for good out of the gray comes the first color of spring...

And quickly following are the Crocus.

Max was diligent with her camera to capture the emergence of Spring with her point and shoot as we took Brutus for his daily walks.

A Walk at Glenwood Gardens:

A Walk in the Neighborhood:

As Spring moved forward the arrays of color expanded.  The Cincinnati Zoo is also a botanical garden that claims over one million bulbs in the ground.  I might mention just one more time that it is always a struggle, such a struggle to get Don to come along for a trip to the zoo.  We now engage in only the abbreviated version of his arguments against caging animals and my responses- the rescuing of endangered species- the education of children and others in the beauty of animals- and of course since human kind live in cages (sometimes rather small ones my trips to NYC seem to indicate) why should animals be spared the crowding..  But he can't resist the trip when I mention the flowers!

On this trip the 93,000 tulips were on display and these massive plantings produce a carpet of color...

                     

And then there are some domestic shrubs that simply scream color with such saturation that they appear to be nothing but color. Ahhhhhhhhh, Azaleas.....

Or just over burdened with blooms that weight the plant down. And my favorite!  The Lilac!

But there are also the less obvious flowers that you might or might not even see without close inspection.  These are the flowers I never saw until I saw through Don's eyes.  Their beauty can be overlooked in our rush from place to place.  Now I wait for them each spring. These are some of my favorites since instead of a symphony of color, they are more like a nocturne, quieter and more subtle..  The one below is the flower of the Paw Paw tree.  It it is small reddish brown cup that hangs with the opening down and  is about a centimeter wide.  I was under the flower shooting the picture straight up to the sky.  In the fall this tree will have large green Paw Paws hanging down that have a sweet banana taste.

And this tiny flower is from a Sasafrass tree.  These blooms are only a few millimeters wide.

And these clusters from a native black cherry tree are usually never recognized because they only last a couple of days on the tree.

This is the flower from a Hawthorn tree taken very close up.  The tree will turn white with blooms, but the individual flowers are much more spectacular.

And finally a Chinese Dog Wood flower.