I think I am in love

When we moved into the Landfill 25 years ago (okay, it is now almost 26 years), there was this big beautiful PINK flowering crab tree in the front. It wasn’t what sold me the house. I doubt that I even noticed it when we first looked at the house. It was just another tree. Too early in the spring for the flowers to be in bloom. What sold me on the landfill was that there was a WOODS behind it. It is a teeny-tiny woods but it is a woods with trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit in the spring and I think this is probably about the only landfill on the Planet Ann Arbor that has a woods behind it that we can afford. Then and now.

Our flowering crab tree was old when we moved in but it was gorgeous with beautiful light pink flowers. Mouse was born on April 24th and I will always remember that it was a Friday when she was born and, even though we came home when she was 24 hours old, those flowers seemed to have bloomed overnight.

The tree was old when we moved in and in the later years, it started to die, helped along by a horrible summer of drought and sustained 90-100 degree temperatures. We often have hot summers here in lower Michigan but this was unusual. In the ensuing years, small branches fell off and then larger branches and finally it was just a skeleton and my blasted black thumb poked right into my all too tender heart. The GG cut all of the remaining branches off just before Halloween a couple years ago and installed some eyes from the robot store into some big knots. Last fall he bought me a new tree. Yaknow, the flowers on this tree are not quite the light pink color that I wanted, like what was on the old tree. They are darker. Send a man to describe pink and whaddya get. Not exactly what I had specified. But she is a beautiful tree, don’tcha think? I LOVE her. I have no idea what gender she is (-; She is thriving right now with flowers everywhere. She is beautiful. I hope I [we] can keep her alive. I think she needs a sister. With slightly lighter pink flowers. I will make sure that I love both of my trees equally. I promise.

6 Responses to “I think I am in love”

  1. isa Says:

    If I’m understanding things correctly, the trees with flowers and fruit are female. Male trees have pollen. One of the reasons people have such trouble with allergies is that many cities plant male trees to avoid fruit and flower clean-up, so there’s tons of pollen in the air. Planting female trees would alleviate a fair amount of the problem. Peanut gallery/those more knowledgeable?

    That tree is pretty 🙂

  2. Uncly Uncle Says:

    I would say the color is fuschia.

  3. Pooh Says:

    “Love is in the air…” Huh, i thought it was just pollen that was making me cry. Oh wait, pollen is plant love, or at least plant lust. Some plants are male, some are female, some are both, i.e. they have both pollen and ovules. If they have both, they usually have elaborate mechanisms to prevent self-pollination.

  4. kayak woman Says:

    I thought I heard something about the pollen issue on NPR but didn’t listen closely to the article. Probably wrangling with some blasted tailgater 😉

    (Er, “tailgater” almost looks like “alligator”…)

  5. isa Says:

    I read alligator.

  6. Dona Says:

    Simply beautiful.