Here is my entry to Becca’s Sunday Trees – 275 Tree challenge.
Lots of coral washed ashore at coral beach, Tenacatita, Mexico, as well as this beautiful big tree. Lest you think it is a mere tumbleweed, I’ve included another photo to show its scale.
Posted for Becca’s Sunday Tree prompt.
This is my favorite stage of bloom for this tree. At this point, the blooms look like something out of Dr. Seuss. Sort of goofy. We need more goofy in our lives, so I’m sharing them:
(Click on photos to enlarge.)
To see other stages of blooming–all present on the same tree/bush at the same time, go HERE and HERE.
I don’t know what bush/tree this was at the carwash, but it was exhibiting every stage of blooming at the same time—from first buds to flowers to these amazing clusters of berries. I took seventeen shots, and got a clean car to boot! I’ll show other stages later.
Click on first photo to enlarge both.
https://ceenphotography.com/2017/01/08/flower-of-the-day-january-9-2017-bearded-iris/
Palm trees, hibiscus, bamboo and pistachio tree. Remove them from this scene and what would you have? Trees are both the life and the decorations of our world. They soften harsh edges as well as some of the ugliness of our world. They give us breath, shade and shelter, food and some of the sweetness of life. They provide homes for birds and other animals and a foundation for our westward expansion.
But most of all, for me, they give a place for my eyes to rest upon that assures me that whatever ills men may promulgate upon other men, that nature remains constant. It is not that it does not change, but within the larger cycle, all is constant, as it is in our human cycle. What we see as good and evil take their turns in ascendancy, but still, we return at some part of this cycle to the norm. The success of our lives has to do with how hard we work to maintain the norm in our own lives, in spite of what is happening in the larger cycles.
This is what I think of when I look at trees. For fourteen years, I lived surrounded by Redwood Trees. They were there before I was born and will hopefully be there after I die. Taller and older than us, if they had a consciousness, they could see the larger picture. Our world is a living thing that regards us as a symbiotic partner or a bothersome pest. It is up to us which we become.
Wish I knew the story of this ancient one that stands in the marketplace near the river in Puerto Vallarta. I believe it is a banyan tree, but I am open to being corrected.
https://beccagivens.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/sunday-trees-262/
Tree roots usually grow to three times the diameter of the branch spread, only half of which lie underneath the trunk and canopy. jdb photo
Below
Rising above, magnificent,
a tree is surely heaven sent.
Giving shelter, shade and beauty,
as though each function were its duty.
Squirrels on branches, falling leaves
caught up by the roofs and eaves.
With moss for hair and bark for sleeves,
and vast foundation that now heaves
the sidewalks up and breaks the earth
as roots grow in length and girth,
imagine it spread far below
what we see and what we know.
Under the driveway, house and street.
Under the car. Under your feet.
As branches spread, so grows the root.
And through its branches, far underfoot,
tunnel earthworms, spiders, voles,
shrews and woodchucks, ants and moles.
For gourmands, sights of trees evoke
thoughts of truffles on roots of oak.
All things have lives both seen and hidden
as they do what nature has bidden.
Cicadas burrowing and feeding,
all this wildlife living, breeding.
Our lives are richer whenever we
are shaded by a massive tree
or see its branches iced with snow,
but we do not see what lies below.
White oaks, walnuts, hickories—
all have creatures such as these
living their lives underground
in the solace they have found
curled up in their slumbering coils
or ventilating root-twined soils.
So, as you come and as you go,
surveying all you’ve come to know—
leaf shadows and the curl of moss,
the branches’ harmonies and toss
of snowflakes as wind stirs their snow,
please also think of what’s below,
far beneath the branches of
every tree we’ve grown to love.
The prompt today is Tree.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 