The Promise of Spring

The leafing out of trees is the biggest single transformation of spring.  It won't happen here for nearly another two months, but the buds on our trees begin to swell long before that.  You can fairly easily learn to identify trees by their buds too, without waiting for the leaves.  So I went out to check on some of our trees.

The buds on the Silver Maple branches are the most obvious in our yard.  You can tell how they've been expanding from 50 feet away.  This is the one tree that marks early spring here.

There are buds on all the trees of course, but some of them aren't really obvious, and others are still wrapped up tight.  These are the catkins on the White Birch, still completely closed.

The Blue Ash is unusual for this far north, but I planted about 3 to see if they would survive.  You can see the four sharp ridges on the twigs, which make it very easy to identify.

You can also tell very easily whether the branches will be alternate or opposite.  Opposite buds will of course grow into opposite twigs, so this is a White Ash.

And this is a Lilac shrub, which also has opposite buds and twigs.

The sharp little buds of the Sugar Maple are still totally closed.  Again, the buds and the twigs are opposite, though here the centre branch has been broken (or nipped) off.

The long sharp buds of the Beech tree are really unique, though not starting to unfold at all.  We only have one Beech, a small sapling I planted.

And this unusual lumpy looking twig and buds is a small Gingko sapling that is surviving here, if not growing very fast.  The key question is whether these buds look any different than they did in December!  It's the swelling of the buds that represents spring.  Certainly that's true for the first picture, the Silver Maple, but I don't know for the others.

Never- the-less, all these buds represent the promise of spring to me, and I will perhaps revisit them to show you.  Today was one of those early sunny spring days too, with our remaining snow disappearing fast as the temperature was well above freezing.  Hoping for more days like this, rather than reverting to winter!

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