Outside My Window

Last week the trees put on their best apparel, all decked out in flowers. The weather was fine - not cold like today. Here are some memories from last week’s beautiful weather, captured on my cell phone camera.

An apple tree in full bloom behind WQED’s offices. It looked lovely and smelled sweet, the quintessential flowering tree.

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A London plane tree in Greenfield sporting red and green balls. The balls are covered with the tree’s tiny flowers. When the flowers are fertilized, the balls become seeds that break up and float away in the wind the following spring.

This tree is a hybrid of the Oriental plane tree and American sycamore. Many of them were planted in Pittsburgh more than 100 years ago because they are very tolerant of air pollution.

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A sugar maple in full flower. From below, its flowers look like fluffy, pale green, hanging leaves but they are actually bunches of small flowers suspended on long stems. They are pollinated by both insects and wind.

And yes, the pollen count was high last week.

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It was almost 60^o today in Pittsburgh.  When I got home from work the crocuses had started blooming in my back yard. 

Marcy Cunkleman’s yard in Indiana County gets more sun so her flowers started blooming last week.  And with the flowers came the honeybees.

Thanks for the photo, Marcy.

I’m going to take a brief side trip today and discuss plants and a very cool project you can participate in.

Last Saturday I listened to the radio show Living on Earth.  Here in Pittsburgh it’s broadcast at 6:00am on Saturdays on WDUQ so you have to be up early to hear it. 

The segment that intrigued me was about Project Budburst in which volunteers help scientists track climate change by reporting when plants bloom or leaf out. 

All you need to do is sign up online here.  Then, just record when a plant blooms or leafs out and where it was when you saw it.  Project Budburst does the rest.  They collect the data and correlate species, blooming time and location to chart the effects of climate change.

The project is interested in all kinds of plants.  The plants don’t even have to be native species.  You can report on lilacs, forsythia, dandelions and common weeds in your back yard.  Now, that’s easy!  Even I can do that!

I know that many of you spend time outdoors and in your garden.   Even if you only report once, it will improve the data. 

Read more about the project - and the science of phenology - at the links above.  Or click on the columbine picture from the Project Budburst website and it’ll take you right there.