A long time between entries

It has now been something like six weeks since the last entry, a record that I sincerely hope is never broken. Life has been busy, what with moving, working on the old house, starting a new garden, observing Earth Day with an amazing group of humans, and dealing with the usual end-of-semester rush, but there is no real excuse for not taking the time to appreciate fully one's surroundings and share those observations.

And what surroundings they are. The arboretum across the street has exploded with bloom, including a quite lovely silverbell,

lots of dogwood, redbud, several varieties of crabapple, and Asian magnolias in abundance.

When a cultivar (in this case, a pink dogwood) is this lovely, I cannot wish for the straight species,although those have also had a good year.

And--we have TULIPS!!! After more than a decade of tulipless springs (thanks to the Mid-Ohio Valley urban deer herds), we now live on a street that the Bambis have (so far) not visited. I went a little crazy last fall, putting so many tulips in the lawn strip that total strangers have stopped to photograph the display. And this week--the parrot tulips bloomed.

I think I'm in love.