Springtime in Palo Alto!

[ellarien]

I'm in Palo Alto, and it's spring, and there are spring flowers everywhere: purple magnolias laden with bloom; fragile pink and white blossom; camellias; primulas; iceplant; asters; cyclamen. Some trees are at just that stage of being about to burst into leaf that makes an almost illusory haze of green in the branches, and the grass is tender, vibrant green. I saw a white heron, or crane, or something, right by the San Jose airport -- I thought it was fake until it moved -- and a whole flock of little finchlike things with shiny white-gold chests, blue backs, and crested heads in a tree of white blossom.

It's amazing how much better I feel for having seen all this, and the green wooded hills, and the ocean.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

March 7th in Chigwell, and the magnolia in next door's garden is coming into flower. Global warming, what global warming...?

[ellarien]

The thing is, the main effect of climate change on southern Arizona this year was to give us a few hard frosts in January, as a result of which we're having a decidedly disappointing spring, with nothing much going on, even yet, but the pansies and petunias of the winter bedding. So real spring flowers are very welcome.

And I've never seen magnolias so covered in bloom as the ones I saw yesterday, though I remember that the London ones were more impressive than what I was used to up north.