Common Nature

(Am I the only person who has a grudge against Monty Python for that sketch? Every time I try to get someone to teach me how to do it, or teach someone else how, it's just larches all the way down.)

Anyway! It's been awhile - I'm sorry for the break in Fecundity posts; a combination of camera!fail and life getting away from me for awhile broke my momentum. There should be one this Sunday, though possibly without photos (and I have two of the missed weeks' posts almost done, so hopefully I will be able to play catch-up.

And in the meantime, spring has moved on without me. This is the time of year in my climate where it starts to be difficult to keep up with everything that's blooming. What's flowering where you are?

( Currently blooming in my yard )
...and every kind of tree and shrub in existence. OMG, the POLLEN. It is ridiculous.

But! The good thing about tree-pollen season is that it's the best time for a non-expert to identify trees to species, even from a distance, because when the flowers are out, trees that are difficult to distinguish or non-descript in summer can be very easy. (See? We'd get back to the post title eventually!)

The ornamental flowering trees - dogwood, apple, pear, and cherry are commonest where I live - are quite easy to learn, and quite showy, for a few weeks in spring, and then go back to being tree-shaped trees with leaf-shaped leaves the rest of the year. The different maple species come out in flower before leaves, and most of the species have very distinct flower colors, even from a distance - Sibly Guides has a blog post up showing some of the common North American ones.

Less showy trees you might have to look down at the ground, as the flowers drop, especially the male flowers in the many species that have separate male and female ones. Most oak flowers are long fuzzy-looking brown things that resemble caterpillars, with every species quite distict. Maples look almost like sprays of tiny bells. Sweet gum trees have male flowers that look like Christmas trees made of tiny pom-poms and female ones that look like green starbursts. Some of the other common trees - like nut trees and poplars - won't flower until a while later. And no, I still have no idea how to identify a larch. :P

I've been living in the same plot of land my whole life, and the flora hasn't changed very much, and yet every year I learn new things and notice things I've never noticed before.