--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing
Here and now, most of the trees aren't fully in leaf, but they will be soon. This is the time we find trees of different species at different stages of sending forth their flowers and leaves. Most of them are just getting started, and look like the ones below, changing every day as the time of full foliage draws closer.
The sky behind these trees at this moment will be mostly obscured in a week or two.
My oaks are gold rather than Merton's silver. Gold is the color of the flowers--reproductive organs--on these red oaks.
These river birches also hold flowers.
Trees with small, briefly-appearing flowers aren't known for those tiny, ephemeral flowers, but deciduous trees are flowering plants, plants that hold their seeds in protective case-like structures, from which all the flowering plants take the name angiosperms. Their flowers are overwhelmingly prolific, as anyone who has tried to keep what we call "weeds" out of a garden knows.
The writer and naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a wonderful essay called "How Flowers Changed the World," a part of his book The Immense Journey. Eiseley writes of
. . . fantastic little seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys [bringing] with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. [The new plants] glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before . . ."
The foods, Eiseley continues, came in three forms--pollen and nectar, fruits, and the food encased along with the seed itself. Until these food sources were available, nourishment for the high caloric needs of warm-blooded animals like ourselves was very limited. We're connected in our evolutionary history to these plants and owe them a great deal for the fact of our existence.
Animals that aren't warm-blooded don't have the metabolic horsepower to keep them active in cold weather. This eastern box turtle seems to have just awakened. I don't believe he's been up long, because dried mud on his shell looks like leavings of what he may have slept under through the cold months. His torpor is still evident, too. When I picked him up, he seemed unable to retract his head completely into his shell. In summer, these guys do that very swiftly.
Some of the trees are in different stages. This buckeye, or horse chestnut, has its leaves in summer form. The red flowers growing along the racemes will blossom in the coming weeks.
And finally, did A. E. Houseman see something like the image below when he wrote these lines?
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with blossom on the bow . . .
This liminal time of spring, a moment of transition in the year like dawn to a day, exhilarates. The phrase "promise of spring" means something, if only another year of growth, another year of fruits, pollen, grain, livestock, whatever becomes food for something else.
But it's not just a promise. It's a moment. One to be appreciated because of its beauty, and because it won't be around long.
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