New Spring Leaves

It's spring again--a little earlier this year, so they say. It is always exciting to me somehow to see the new leaves pushing out from all the various species of plants. It's like a promise of sorts. By late summer, those same leaves will be chewed on by insects, stippled by mites, and spotted by diseases; but right now, they are pristine. Most were formed last fall inside the bud as tiny versions of themselves. All of the cells are there in the bud. In spring, they puff up with water, like water balloons, and push out of the buds, swelling to their natural size before they harden their cell walls. Sometimes they don't have their complete level of chlorophyll yet, so they have a red blush--like the little oak leaves in the pics below. Click on an image to see an enlarged view.

Here's a sampling of what I'm seeing:

Red Buckeye in bud (native forest tree in our backyard) -- hummingbirds love it!

Mistletoe

New fiddlehead of Cinnamon Fern on the east side of our house.

Flower bud of Wisteria vine in Fayetteville.

Shumard Oak in our backyard.

Shumard Oak again.

'Forest Pansy' Redbud in Fayetteville.

Flowering Almond

Thirty foot-tall Bald Cypress in my yard, once a tiny seedling in a Southern Arkansas swamp.

Strawberry.

Dogwood

Viburnum

Virginia Creeper

Poison Ivy

Variegated Iris and Lily Pads in our water garden.

Elm leaves & seeds.

Native Virginia Bluebells by our water garden.