Poinciana Tree!

This blooming Poinciana tree…

…Delonix regia…

…flamboyant fi true!

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Tree in a Backyard: Minnesota

I stood in a backyard in St Paul, Minnesota, trying to take a photo of a bright red cardinal as it flitted from tree to tree. Such a beautiful bird, but it just wouldn’t sit still! Every time I moved slowly into position to snap a photo, the bird flew off to a new vantage point! So I got no photo of the bird….

This tree in the backyard, however, stayed still enough for me to take a number of photos, which I now share with you. If anyone can identify the tree for me, I would be grateful.

Here is its crown pictured with two other trees against a clear blue sky…

It had beautiful blossoms in abundance…

Here they are closer up…

The tree had such wonderfully rugged bark…

And if you look very carefully, up towards the right in this photo, you may see the branch on which the cardinal was sitting moments before I captured this image!

Pausing on Garden Boulevard, Mona Heights

Garden Boulevard is the longest road in Mona Heights, running from the intersection with Old Hope Road near the Hope Gardens gate all the way to the intersection with Mona Road, where the aqueduct leads into the Mona Dam.

As I turned onto Garden Boulevard at the Mona Road intersection last week, I noticed that some of the trees along the sidewalk had recently been cut.

It was the bright colour of the cut wood that caught my attention and made me stop, park and get closer, to take photos of the pruned privet trees. The only sign of those who had done the cutting was a red cap seemingly forgotten near one of the pruned trees.

Cut surfaces of different sizes and shapes.

 

And already, across the stump of one felled tree…

…something new had begun to grow….

Small details captured while pausing on a long road in Mona Heights one morning….

(And if you’d like to see the full length of Garden Boulevard, take a look at this video I found online- click here.)

 

Pink Clouds at Sunset

I climb up to the roof and see the setting sun is turning clouds to pink. The traveler’s palm, the water oak, the Number Eleven mango tree all line up against the goodnight sky.

The smiling moon sits behind pink clouds at sunset. “My time now,” she says….

One Afternoon on Daisy Avenue, Mona Heights

We moved to Mona Heights more than fifty years ago and although we never lived on Daisy Avenue, I knew it well. I haven’t lived in Mona for decades now, but drive through often. When I saw this view recently as I drove up Daisy Avenue, I stopped to take some photos…

…two magnificent Royal Palms stood guard in someone’s yard…

…shadows on a trunk…

…leaves against the sky…

…a few moments one afternoon, on Daisy Avenue, Mona Heights…

One Coconut Tree at Sunset

I normally take photos of this coconut tree at sunrise. I must have taken hundreds of photos of it over the years…against spectacular red skies or pink clouds…or lit by sunlight as the sun comes over the mountains…or in silhouette…sheltering doves or baldpates or on one occasion a very steely-eyed johncrow. But today I photographed the coconut tree, not as the sun was rising, but as it was setting…

This meant that I was standing on my roof with my back to the setting sun……seeing coconuts at various stages of development……some very small ones, just starting out….And all the while, behind me, the sun continued to set…

A Venerable Mango Tree: On A Sunday

The morning after Gilbert had raked its eye across Jamaica’s spine, blasting through decades of complacency and careless wishes to experience a real hurricane, I went to see how a nearby neighbour was doing. Part of his roof was sitting in our front yard and when I got to his house, I could see that all of the roof had been blown off during the storm. He was all right, he said. He and his sister, both of them quite elderly, had retreated to the only part of the house with a concrete slab roof and his family had called and were on their way to help.

But, he told me, I could expect the next mango season to be a bountiful one. The hurricane would have pruned branches, shaken up the roots and new life would be coursing through the trees that had survived.

And he was right. The massive old Bombay mango tree in our back yard has never borne fruit as abundantly as it did in the post- Gilbert season. Not in the thirty years since Sept 1988. 

It was an old and venerable tree even then. Older and even more venerable now. It has had encounters with subsequent storms that have brushed past since. This year hasn’t been a very good season for the old Bombay tree, in fact. Relatively few in number, with a high incidence of worms in the ripe fruit.

The height of the hurricane season is still to come.

I don’t believe that there have to be storms for there to be good crops, not literally or figuratively. But my Bombay mango tree may be aligned with my old (long deceased) neighbour’s words.