Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Redbuds are not red

The magnolias have bloomed and faded. This week the redbuds, apples, and pears have been in their glory. The redbud is native to the eastern U.S. It is a small tree, never getting much over 30 feet tall. The trunks form strange shapes, as the one in the picture below has done.

The flowers are very pretty, but they are not red--they are purple-pink. The fruit is a pod that hangs on in the winter, so the shape of the tree plus the pods makes them easy to identify even in the winter.

There has been a project to make a redbud trail in Brookside Park and into Weston Cemetery. The trees do not seem to be doing all that well this spring. However, the picture below is of one of the trees on this trail. (I do not know why they are not growing better. I have spent several years trying to kill one that is growing where I do not want it to grow. If you cut down a big one, it sends up lots of new shoots.)
Also in their glory this week are the flowering apples and pears. Below is a flowering crab next to Van Rensselaer Grade School.
There are two very pretty flowering crabs in Memorial Park. Memorial (or Flat Iron) Park may be look better this week than during any other week of the year.Most regular apples, those meant for use as fruit as opposed to the crab apples which are mostly meant for decoration, have white flowers, as do pears. I think the flowers below are pears, but apple blossoms are almost the same. Pears and apples are closely related.
As the week ends, the liliac are starting to flower. Here is one across the street from the Carneige Center that has bloomed.
Meanwhile, the wind-pollinate trees are also blooming, though hardly anyone notices. I found a lot of boxelder near the river in Weston Cemetery. Boxelder are a type of maple, though you might not recognize that from their leaves. I grew up with boxelders in Minnesota, where they seem to be more common than they are in Indiana. They do not seem to be planted much in urban areas, maybe in part because they can attract large numbers of boxelder bugs. They are also one of the trees that are usually either male or female.
The birch are also flowering.
I took a lot more pictures of spring flowers and used a lot of them in the video here.

2 comments:

30-year-refugee said...

nice to see a cameo by my friend the flat iron rock.

Anonymous said...

Keep the blooming photos coming!