Maple Flowers and Marsh Marigolds

I was right about the trees turning green that I shared the other day; for the most part it's not the leaves but the flowers of the Sugar Maples that provide that light green glow, rapidly followed by the leaves emerging.  I fear most people don't actually notice Sugar Maple flowers, and because they're green, we just think it's leaves starting to unfold.

Sugar Maple flowers are tiny drooping umbels of flowers hanging down on long thin pedicels.  The whole cluster here is about 3" tall, but the flowers are the tiny bells of stamens and pistils, about 1/8" in size at the bottom of the thin pedicels.

They give the canopy of the tree a bright yellow-green colour, but only for a few days until the leaves emerge.

It took me some time this afternoon driving around the rural roads until I found a maple with branches low enough to get these pictures, and they were all blowing in the wind, the slightest breeze enough to move them..

For some reason only a few of the thousands of Sugar Maples around here are flowering; perhaps these are just the early ones.  You can see there's only one tree down this road that has that characteristic green canopy.

I stopped down by the Beaver River too, to check out the Marsh Marigolds on the floodplain at the bottom of Kimberley Forest.

There's a large area there that is just yellow with them at the moment, all with their feet wet.

I see the bright yellow flowers flash by in a lot of ditches as I drive around the valley, one of the more obvious markers of the changing seasons here.