Tagged With: Holly

Holly Flowers

Photograph taken on Saturday, April 28, 2018 by Henry
Holly Flowers

Holly Flowers

We don’t normally think of hollies as being flowering tress but of course they are, as members of angiosperms (a.k.a. the magnoliophyta) they are flowering plants. Their flowers are not nearly as showy as their fruit, however, consisting of tiny, yellow flowers. Holly flowers are generally greenish white and as you can see in this picture, on this particular holly they are grouped along the stem in. They have four petals and this holly, like most species of Ilex is dioecious, meaning that there are separate male and female plants. This one is apparently male, as it has flowers each year but never has fruit.

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Winter’s First Snow

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 11, 2019 by Henry
Winter's First Snow

Winter’s First Snow

We had our first snow of the winter overnight. It wasn’t anything that was going to snarl traffic, melting on roadways and not amounting to more than a thin covering on the grass, but it was snow. Early morning after a snow is often quite pretty, especially if the clouds that brought the snow have cleared and it’s sunny. That was the case today. I took a few pictures in the front yard, including this one of the holly near our driveway. The robins generally come at some point in the winter and devour all the berries from this tree. They congregated in another holly a couple days ago and have pretty much stripped that one.

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Holly Berries

Photograph taken on Sunday, October 25, 2020 by Henry
Holly Berries

Holly Berries

We have a really nice crop of holly berries on the tree in front of our house this fall. The squirrels are constantly in this tree and the ground underneath it, including the front walk, is constantly littered with pieces of berry and the occasional leaf. The robins also like them and generally, at some point in the winter, we’ll look out and they will be systematically devouring them. There is another holly at the corner of the house and the robins have found that one and were up in it the other day. So far this one has just been the squirrels, though.

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Snow and Holly

Photograph taken on Monday, January 17, 2022 by Henry
Holly in Snow

Holly in Snow

We have the day off for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day today, for only the second time. It’s nice to have something after New Year’s Day, although we still have a fairly long gap before our next holiday, Memorial Day near the end of May. Still, we’ll take what we can get. There was a little snow on the ground today but the sky was clear and it was sunny and nice. We took a walk in the neighborhood and enjoyed being outdoors. I also finished reading Evenor, a collection of three short stories, by George MacDonald and started reading Piers the Ploughman, written sometime around 1370 by William Langland. So, a nice day, overall.

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