1 May 2018 – Day-length leaps ahead now, and nature leaps with it. We’re in the UBC Botanical Garden, a perfect place to join the dance.
Yes, of course, great bursts of colour smack the eye in every direction …
but our eyes skitter away. We look instead for tiny details, such as minute red dots on emerging white buds, for example …
and also for the the fresh green play of light and shadow.
A towering Gingko biloba, clothed in emerging baby leaves, is radiant in the morning sunshine.
There is luminous green everywhere we look.
In skunk cabbage leaves, shadows etched against light …
and in a mossy tree crotch, bouncing its textures back & forth.
All the contrasts of early spring.
New fern growth just starting to uncoil above existing mature fronds — the one so tiny, so baby-tender-green; the other coarse, dark, brilliant.
Defiant new growth, here one sprig shooting upright from the top of a lopped tree trunk …
and defiant old growth as well. Four or five centuries old.
This tree also wears its defiance at the tip — except here it is scorched and bare, not green.
We had already read the sign at its base.
A bit farther down the path, we turn back and pick out Eagle Tree in the canopy.
We stand there a moment, silent. For Eagle Tree.
For the whole great dance of light & life.
morselsandscraps
/ 1 May 2018A lovely celebration of spring in all its eruptions, and of the eagle tree. I’m feeling the same luxuriant delight here in Warsaw.
Richard Schulte
/ 2 May 2018Those trunks are like a vertical timeline!
icelandpenny
/ 15 May 2018exactly, yes
Dominic Dalston
/ 2 May 2018I love the features that you’ve chosen to spotlight and your writing is really well observed. Nice to see what you are doing walking woman.
WalkFrederick
/ 5 May 2018Spring is a time of renewal every where, isn’t it? Thanks for sharing your finds. 🙂
TheStealthArtCollective
/ 7 May 2018Wow, you are so far ahead of us back here in Toronto! Although our trees are beginning to show green breath at the tips of their branches and that gorgeous ‘sticky green’ of spring is gradually becoming more than just a promise. Beautiful photos…
icelandpenny
/ 15 May 2018belated thanks — and your spring has finally arrived