I love this precise moment of spring, the way that the budding leaves on the trees are so fresh and vital, their golden inflorescences draped from branches like showers of soft green foam.

The boughs in their shape come close to resembling the imaginary powder-puff trees of artists like Claude Lorraine and those early Australian artists who could only paint the bush containing the soft-leaved european trees of home rather than the alien, unknowable eucalypts. Either their minds could not yet accept what they saw before them, or perhaps they were just too lazy to learn how to paint these new trees, because maybe they had no imagination & didn't view trees as important in their own right, beyond being a useful method of framing a picture. It was William Blake who wrote

On a side note - I typed 'inflorescence' into wikipedia to check I was using the right word, and was pleased to find that it is a sphere of information that contains many brilliantly obscure and wonderful sounding words. Ones I liked included:

peduncle
bract
involucre
sympodial
basipetal
axil
corymb
umbel
spadix
spathe
bostryx
thyrse


Have a good weekend everyone!