Springtime

I feel rather middle-aged going around taking pictures of flowers and trees and oooo’ing and aaaaaa’ing over the spring colours but it really is an amazing season here. I really wanted to experience the whole New York in the fall thing because the world would look so orange (without needing to wear my orange-lensed glasses on (yes, of course I have some)) but spring time is quite stunning too.

The growth rate and change in colours is pretty dramatic – not sure why, could be cold nights, hot days, or it could be because everything is going from nothing to something because there are so many bulbs and deciduous trees here. (As a side note, none of the trees are evergreens in this part of the world. Why is that? It seems such a stark contrast to New Zealand where I’m sure the trees all seem to be half ‘n’ half evergreen and deciduous. Here, they have to spend so much time cleaning up leaves and rotten blossoms that you’d think after all these years that various city councils and gardening bodies would’ve evolved gardens to be more self-managing in this world where we’re trying to cut down human involvement in everything (despite the ever increasing population). So, are the deciduous trees everywhere to give the large population jobs cleaning up; is it for vanity so that cities look pretty and different each season and thereby run the small economy that is the framed series of photographs of the Central Park Mall sold by at least 30 sellers in the entrance to the park; is it to make city infrastructure more able to cope with snow dumps by having the snow collect on the roads and sidewalks and wash away down drains and not weigh heavily in trees, breaking them or having ice clods falling on unsuspecting pedestrians or is it just a simple fact of nature, something so simple that it’s just too cold here in the winter for evergreen trees to survive and by standing as rugged stick versions of themselves they endure the cold?)

Anyway, on with the pretty pictures!

Streets all over the place have beautiful blocks of colour, usually tulips, under trees on the sidewalk.

Trees all blossom at the same time in great fluffy clouds of pink or white. And there are loads of magnolia trees around the city – I thought they were kind of rare and special seeing as they’re often commented on in gardens back home, but here they’re a city tree for sure.