Winter at the Arnold Arboretum (3)

 

 

Winter at the Arnold Arboretum (2)

Winter at the Arnold Arboretum (1)

As some readers of this blog know, I have very recently moved back to Boston after seven and a half years in North Carolina preceded by a decade in California. Because I have close family here as well as friends and colleague, I have been back for visits during those more than seventeen years, but they have been either short or very focused. It is good to be back here as a resident.

Here is some winter beauty from three recent walks (on days with very different weather) at the Arnold Arboretum.

The Arboretum is a public-private partnership between the City of Boston and Harvard University. Read a description of it here.

 

This is the night...

Lève-toi, réveille-toi d'entre les morts!

Click photo to enlarge and see detail.

See here and here for more from Kariye (Chora) in Istanbul.
Click the French line above for Resurrection chant from Taizé.

The tender green of spring

March 29.

Blooms in black and white, March 27

Imbolc

Imbolc.
Soft rain.
The earth smells
like earth.

Daffodil shoots a few hours before the rain.
February 1, 2011.
Photo by Jane Redmont.

New Year: 1/1/11

Photo: Hubbard Brook [New Hampshire] Ecosystem Study

Cross country skiing in Greensboro

I must be one of the few Greensboro residents who keeps cross country skis by the front door. I live in hope. Also, I don't have enough storage space.

I used the skis early last March when we had a good snow, and today I used them again. Yesterday the sky was grey-white and heavy. Today the sun was bright and the sky clear. Perfect for skiing, though cold.

At last the huge plot of land here is good for something. On Facebook I referred to it all summer as the Humongous Lawn and I was forever mowing it --and suffering from the mosquitos, who love me, and from wasp stings, because we had an infestation. Today I made trails and got quite the little workout.

I love the smell of snow. To me it is the smell of winter vacation. This isn't the Alps, but even in this semi-suburban neighborhood the smell reminds me of ski trips and crisp air at high altitude.








Taking the skis off...

Lily season

The first lilies bloomed a while back, but now they are here in full force, just as the hydrangeas are fading.  You can see the Humongous Lawn, as I refer to it on Facebook, in the first picture.  I spend my time mowing. Then again, it burns calories and it beats going to the gym, except for the heat and the bugs.  Speaking of the bugs, who just love me, I think the proper order of things is 1) apply sunscreen, 2) apply bug spray.  For a while I wasn't sure.  But I digress.

I took the three photos above in the bright sun on Sunday after returning from church, sometime after 1:00 p.m.

Yesterday, La Virgencita got some day lilies.  (The first photo is a bit fuzzy.)

Same lilies, close up.  They look Van Gogh-ish in this photo.  They are a much brighter orange in reality.

 

 Here endeth the tour of the day lilies.

Hydrangea catch-up

Good heavens.  I neglected to put up pictures of the hydrangeas when they got really blue.  Though there is one small bush of purple hydrangeas (the color of hydrangeas has to do with the acidity of the soil) the other small bush and the really huge one are both blue, and they went from pale blue (mixed with cream at the core of the flowers when they were just "ripening") to periwinkle.  I took most of the photos with the BlackBerry camera, which distorts the color a bit, so the periwinkle-ness is not obvious, but you can see that the blue is more intense than it was in the first week or too of hydrangea blooming. 

The hydrangea is the only thing I've taken care of this year.  The garden is my landlady's doing and the flowers pop up in due season, one wave after the other.  The hydrangea bushes were full of dead wood --no one had trimmed or pulled it out in years-- so in the late winter or very early spring I got rid of it.  It took a long time and the wood filled about three garbage bins.  I had scratched arms after that, having been attacked by the hydrangeas as I worked.  I now understand why garden ladies garden in long sleeves. The reward was a huge, really huge hydrangea bush, much larger than last year, and even more flowers than last year. Spectacular.

Otherwise, all due credit to the house's owner, to Mother Nature, and to Godde, not necessarily in that order.

 

This is a little purple hydrangea flower after the rain.

In the variegated bouquet below, the middle flower was in fact more blue-purple than the dark blue it appears to be and the right hand flower was more of a dark purple than it appears in the photo.

I'll take photos with a regular camera next time around, but it is handy to have the BBerry in pocket - I just whip it out and click over to the camera function and take a picture.  The camera is especially good with flowers.  It is a little less so with pictures of +Maya and even less so with people pictures, though in a pinch it is helpful to take quick snaps of humans.

I've had flowers next to the Guadalupe candle for weeks now.  Here is Guadalupe with the last of the hydrangeas.

  And this is what some of these flowers looked like as early adolescents.

 And here is the way one looked as a green, unripe baby flower.