Tagged With: Tree

Crataegus viridis ‘Winter King’

Photograph taken on Tuesday, October 01, 2019 by Henry
Crataegus viridis ‘Winter King’

Crataegus viridis ‘Winter King’

When I got rid of the nearly dead Colorado blue spruce (Picea pungens) in our front yard, we wanted to replace it with something small but with a little more interest. We decided on a hawthorn and last week I ordered this Crataegus viridis ‘Winter King’ and it was planted yesterday. The leaves are a little dry but it seems pretty healthy and I’m looking forward to the white blossoms in the spring as well as the fruit that you can see is on it now. The green hawthorn is more disease resistant than most hawthorns and ‘Winter King’ was selected, among other reasons, for that reason. This variety is also “noted for its profuse bloom of flowers, larger fruits, silvery-barked stems and more attractive fall color (purple and scarlet).”

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Walnut Bark

Photograph taken on Tuesday, October 15, 2019 by Henry
Walnut Bark

Walnut Bark

It was a pretty day today. The weather has finally turned cool and it’s clearly autumn now. The leaves on the trees are still mostly green but there are occasional splashes of color from early maples or some of the smaller plants that tend to react more quickly to the changing seasons. Outside my office window, the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is a deep red, climbing up into two large elms and the other trees on the edge of the woods. Cathy and I met at a picnic table briefly early in the afternoon and then I walked in the woods and took a few pictures, including this one of the bark of a black walnut tree (Juglans nigra).

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Tulip Poplars

Photograph taken on Sunday, February 09, 2020 by Henry
Tulip Poplars

Tulip Poplars

Cathy, Dorothy, and I went to Seneca Creek State Park this afternoon and walked just short of 3 miles in the woods. It was a cool but pretty day with deep blue skies. The woods are predominated by tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) with a significant number of other deciduous trees including oaks, maples, beeches, and various smaller trees. I think the fact that they grow so quickly accounts for their numbers, as they outgrow the slower growing but longer lived hardwoods. Eventually, the oaks, maples, and beeches will outlive this first growth of poplars and it will all even out or even lean towards the others. But for now, the wood is filled with the straight trunks of the tulip poplar.

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Zelkova Alley

Photograph taken on Saturday, November 07, 2020 by Henry
Zelkova serrata

Zelkova serrata

We worked in the garage this morning, getting quite a bit done (although if you saw it, you might not believe that). We took a trip to the transfer station (a.k.a. the dump) to get rid of a few things and as we got back, the Zelkova serrata were being lit by the late afternoon sun. I dropped Cathy and her mom off at home and then went back out to take a few pictures. This seems to be an annual photo for me, with versions taken from 2011 through 2019, except 2012, apparently. It’s worth it, though. This is really a nice tunnel of trees all year, but especially now and as the sun is setting.

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Sycamore Tree

Photograph taken on Sunday, December 06, 2020 by Henry
Sycamore Tree

Sycamore Tree (Platanus occidentalis)

This American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) is in our neighbor’s yard. It’s a bit, healthy tree and in the summer it is often lovely at dusk with the evening sun turning the bright green leaves a wonderful orange-green that’s very hard to describe. In the winter, without its leaves, the beauty of the sycamore is in their bark, which is a lovely white, especially against the blue of a winter sky. They are large trees and generally better suited to parks and open areas but they also make a fine city tree, being quite tolerant in their habits.

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Juniper Trunk

Photograph taken on Monday, January 02, 2023 by Henry
Juniper Trunk

Juniper Trunk

Cathy, Dorothy, and I went for a walk at Red Gate Park today. This used to be Red Gate Golf Course but it’s been closed for a while and is now a very nice park with plenty of paved paths (the old cart paths) so you can walk easily even when it’s wet. There is less to photograph in the winter but I took my camera, in any case. I took pictures of a few trees that I think looked interesting. I also ‘processed’ a few of them into black and white images.

I say processed but they are digital, of course, so there’s no processing involved, except for desaturating them. I do my post processing in Corel AfterShot Pro. There are a few annoyances with it but it has the advantage of having versions for both Windows and Linux (and macOS, but that’s not an issue for me). I have both Windows and Linux machines and it’s nice to be able to run this on either one.

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Stump

Photograph taken on Saturday, January 28, 2023 by Henry
Stump

Stump

Cathy, Dorothy, and I walked to Blockhouse Point today. I took my long lens with me but didn’t really see any birds today. I took some long distance shots of the river but only a few. I like this picture of a dried stump, though, mostly for its texture. We stopped again at Rocklands Farm and I took a few pictures there, but nothing to speak of. In the evening we celebrated Chinese New Year at Tsai-Hong’s house with the rest of the local family. That was a nice time. We brought Margaret with us, although getting her up the front steps was a bit of a chore. Next time we’ll go in through the garage (fewer steps and better light).
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Winter Tree

Photograph taken on Tuesday, December 26, 2023 by Henry
Winter Tree

Winter Tree

We went for a late afternoon walk at Sandy Spring today, starting from the Friends Meeting House. It was at this Friends Meeting that my great, great grandparents meet, sometime around 1850 (they were married in 1952). One of them traveled up from Washington, D.C. and the other from Northern Virginia, which was more of an effort then than it is now (even with our traffic problems).

A road runs south from the meeting house across a field to the spring. We turned right just before the spring and looped around, basically circling a large field and going into the woods a little before coming back up to the spring. It was foggy day and getting foggier through the afternoon. We didn’t see many birds and I wasn’t able to photograph any. I like the way this tree looks, though, with the green lichen on it against the foggy background.

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