Monday, March 12, 2007

monday flower semi-deluge

treeblossom1

If you're bored with flowers, today's not your lucky day. Sorry.

I actually have a list of non-seasonal, non-botanical topics I really do mean to post about Real Soon Now. I mean it. Honest. But my free time is somewhat less than copious at the moment, so for right now here's yet another batch of spring flowers. If it's any consolation, someday the novelty's bound to wear off, or my camera will break or something, and I'll stop, probably.

I don't know what kind of tree the top photo is of. Nice flowers, but that's all I can tell you about it.

Updated: With regard to the identification of various plants, I stand multiply corrected. See user comments below. Wherever I say "this is an X", feel free to suppose there's an implicit "not" somewhere in the sentence; it'll all make more sense that way.

Sure, I was a Cub Scout back in the day, but they don't spend a lot of time teaching you how to identify flowers. They probably think it'll turn you gay or something.


Next up, we've got two pics of the (non) dogwoods around the infamous Rusting Chunks No. 5 sculpture, in downtown Portland.

pink_dogwood

white_dogwood

The (non) dogwoods are really the only appealing feature of the whole plaza, and they're only in bloom for a couple of weeks in early spring. The place is supposedly a city park, but there's no sign, it doesn't show up on the city parks department's website, and it doesn't seem to have a name. In a spirit of selfless civic-mindedness, I'd like to help out with that last bit. We often fancy ourselves to be quite the upscale, Euro-pretentious sort of town here, so I propose the place be called La
piazza dei pezzi d'arrugginimento
, which Google Translate claims is Italian for "piazza of rusting chunks".


daffodils_lit

More daffodils. These were in front of an office building, right next to a bright floodlight. Generally speaking, I'm done with daffodils for the season, but I thought it was an interesting effect with the floodlight. Feel free to disagree, though.


snowdrops

Some (totally not) snowdrops in a planter somewhere downtown. Not my favorite spring bulb, but hey, 'tis the season.


treeblossom2

Have you figured out what sort of tree this is yet? Me neither.

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

Your photos are absolutely beautiful as usual! But I am sorry to say, I think your flower identification skills need some work!

Here are my educated guesses as to the species you present today, from the top of your post to the bottom:

pic 1:
Magnolia, possibly Star magnolia? They bloom pretty early.

pics 2 & 3:
These pink and white beauties are not dogwoods, which mostly haven't bloomed yet, but rather something in the Prunus family -- which includes cherries, plums, almonds, apricots, and others. Portland is *full* of various kinds of flowering cherry, which bloom early and which these might be.

pic 4:
Here I have no quarrel, these are indeed daffodils!

pic 5:
These are crocuses, not snowdrops. Snowdrops have several small, nodding flowers in a bunch.

pic 6:
Again, I'd say this is a magnolia!

There are lots of helpful photographs of trees, shrubs, and other landscape plants at OSU's Department of Horticulture: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ldplants/


I'm looking forward to your next post full of photos, even if they're not of lovely flowers!