Detail Diary, Vol #13

High on chlorophyll

March 31 - April 14, 2024

Dear friend,

Spring is cramming itself into these weeks, petals spilling over the edges, green so saturated you can hear it humming. In the wake of blossom-fall¹, leaves are doing their best to steal the show with their tender, vigorous unfolding and increase. In the arboretum where I’m so incredibly lucky to stroll whenever I want a break from work, there is a veritable feast of chlorophyll, young leaves and subtle fruits of all kinds² finding their shapes.

However, the leaves still have competition from the high-spring garden color-bombs that greedy human eyes have cultivated for time untold: tulips, peonies, lilacs, wisteria. At ground level, enterprising wild buttercups and speedwells run their own color rampage. It’s all rather dizzying.

This may result in a rather dizzying Detail Diary recap. I can’t say whether it will be as riveting to you as it has been to me, or if it will glaze over into one long blur of green and color. As I fill my camera roll with peonies and trees, I think fondly of my mom, a prolific and passionate amateur photographer whose photos of dewy roses and sweeping boughs I would usually skip when looking at family photo albums as a kid.³ It took a refining of my photographic palate, the training of my eye to translate my own precious sensory experiences with nature into framing and light and focus, to begin to see my mom’s images for the exquisite gems of art and attention they are.

The visual half of my Detail Diary practice is a direct inheritance of hers.⁴

In my Detail Diary entries I try to be selective and choose just one or a few of the slew of photos of leaves and flowers I end up with on my walks. But the last few weeks have been such an embarrassment of leafy riches that I can’t resist expanding even on the healthy bundle of buds in say, entry #163. Scroll through for bonus leaves⁵, meditative videos of bees, and even an audio snippet of a French trio singing on a sunny day in the arboretum.

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Here is your usual reminder that this post is best viewed on the web or in the Substack app! (From email, click on the title of the post or “Read in app.”) Clicking on a Note will also take you to the browser/app to see its full text and sometimes additional photos. For an introduction to my Detail Diary, see here, or peruse past volumes.

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Bonus leaves:

New leaves of arboretum trees (ID accuracy not guaranteed): Chestnut leaf oak, beech, horse chestnut, black walnut, Weigela (AI's guess, I had no idea), linden (Tilia), Japanese maple, Montpellier maple (that one had an arboretum plaque), ash

The ash keys in the last image looked like this less than a month earlier.

Horse chestnut/buckeye buds come bundled with several leaves and a whole inflorescence, in various stages of opening on this tree

My Detail Diary for March 26-March 30 can be found in this post, which is an extreme departure from the rest of the spring delights:

Back to our regularly scheduled spring programming.

(I forgot to mention that those Magnolia leaves were soft and downy as a three-day-old chick! See Detail Diary Vol #12 for the magnolias in full glory.)

Some more arboretum gems: unidentified umbrella, bleeding heart, something from the carrot family possibly called perfoliate alexanders, and Viburnum

The weather has varied widely in the last few weeks, and though many of my photos are sunny, j’ai bien profité from at least one day’s worth of rain.

I sneakily recorded one of the tuneful French songs the arboretum trio was playing from their sunny bench:

1. At least for ornamental cherries; there were still vigorous blossoms on the chokecherry peaking this week.

2. My arboretum walks in the midst of this jumble of exotic trees all thriving together make me think of

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

’s Substack

Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They're From

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3. I was looking, of course, for myself.

4. Mom, take this as fair warning, I’m going to ask you to do a guest post one of these days!

5. I have even more arboretum photos than I’m adding to this post, because I haven’t forgotten about my Urban Tree Diary project and am hoarding them for future profiles.