Spring Trees and Skies

I thought I would specifically take pictures of certain trees in all four seasons, so I'll end up with comparison shots.  My benchmark is picking trees that look spectacular in mid-October.  So here are a few of the trees that will be in brilliant fall colour in five months, as they look today in spring.

These are two of my favourite mid-October trees.  Having observed the fall colours for several years now, I know which trees will look best.  Now I can do some comparison shots.

This tree, just down the road from our house, turns brilliant red in the fall, .  If you look closely it's really two Sugar Maples intertwined a bit, with the leaves in spring slightly different shades of green.

These are the young maples regenerating quickly, just at the entrance to the woods where I frequently go walking.  The trail in is on the right end of this picture.

Just down the road are another two large Sugar Maples in a fencerow.  When I think of summer, fall and winter pictures, I have lots of time to take those, though only about 3 weeks in the fall.  But the window for spring pictures when the leaves are still bright green like these, is incredibly short - really just a few days.

It's actually the three younger and shorter trees in the foreground here that turn the brightest colour.  The two trees in the background that look half dead are White Ash, which are still barely unfolding their leaves.

And across the street is a cluster of large Basswood trees that are not quite as far out yet, but turn a nice colour in the fall too.  The background trees in the lower right are White Ash again.

To give you an idea of how varied the leaf growth is at the moment, this is a picture of the fencerow behind part of our garden.  The trees on the right in leaf are White Birch (planted), and the tree on the far left is a Sugar Maple.  But in the middle are my Butternut tree (its trunk behind the shed), a Cherry starting to come out in leaf, and another White Ash where the buds are barely opened.  Observing the seasons more closely to describe in the blog has opened my eyes to patterns I never saw in previous years!

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