Our World Tuesday: a blooming shame

I published a photo of my flowering Nanking Cherry already but I just want to explain a little bit about our world...
look at the blossoms...

Photo by Richard Schear, April 2012

Beautiful, aren't they?
But a few days later...see my car in the background?...a few days after my husband took this photo of the Nanking Cherry, my car was covered in snow. For a couple of days I couldn't even look at the back yard to see if the blossoms survived. I looked today, and I see they did weather the storm.
Whether there's weather, or whether there's not, this is our world, southeastern Alberta, Canada, where snow is possible any time of year, even in the middle of one of our scorching hot summers.

Posted for
Our World Tuesday
Click HERE to see other worlds on this same planet.

Skywatch Friday: blossoms under blue sky

Our dog Lindy is as oblivious to the beauty of my blossoming Nanking Cherry as she is to our lovely blue sky, or the ugly duct tape trying (not very successfully) to hold up my honeysuckle arch.

Photo by Richard Schear, April, 2012

Posted for
SkyWatch Friday

My World: trees, berries, flowers

For years, I've called this "my little red tree" because I forgot its name,
and because it didn't grow very fast or very tall,
but now it is about as tall as I am, which is about five foot four, and...

today Dick and I planted this little fella, a "Red Baron Ninebark"
which is now my little red tree and Whatsitsname is my bigger red tree.

Another Whatsitsname. This is my mystery-berry bush. It might be some kind of cotoneaster, but its fruit is soft and is getting ripe, whereas...

I know this one is a cotoneaster, because I remember its name, and I also looked it up online. Its fruit is hard, and stays hard after ripening to a very dark color.

Blossoms on my "pink potentilla" bush. Most of the potentillas
I've seen since moving to Alberta 10 years ago have yellow
blossoms, so I'm very proud of my peachy-pink one, and...

I'm also proud of my white potentilla flowers!

I hardly have any fruit on my Nanking Cherry bushes
this year, although the fruit I do have is...

larger than usual.

My squash garden is blossoming, but I don't seem to be growing very many actual squashes.

Addendum: Thanks to two commenters, Carola B. and Jinksy, for suggesting my first Whatsitsname is a smoke bush. Jinksy further identified it as a cotinus coggyria Royal Purple, which indeed it is, but its common name"smoke bush" is easier for me to remember. Thanks, both of you!

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  My World Tuesday  

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Green, green, it's green on Thursday Theme Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWToT-vdU5k&feature=related

Green, green, it's green, they say,
On the far side of the hill.
Green, green, I'm goin' away
To where the grass is greener still.

The New Christy Minstrels, 1963

Brown, brown, it's brown they say
Out here, on the lone prair-ie,

Brown, brown, I'm goin' away
To where the grass is green to see.

Well, I told my daddy on the day I was ten,
Don't you cry when you see I'm twelve,
There ain't nobody gonna hold me then,
I'm gonna go away by myself.

I don't care if the sun goes down
Where I lay my weary head,
'Cause everywhere the ground is brown
I want to see it green instead.

EV'rybody now...

It's brown, brown, it's brown they say
Out here, on the lone prair-ie,
Brown, brown, I'm goin' away
To where the grass is green to see.

© Words and photos by Kay Davies, May, 2011   

After a long, cold winter, we've had a wet spring, so things are finally greening up

here at our home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play.

Behind the unfurling fern, you can see where blossoms fell from our ornamental crabapple tree (see previous post for a pink song).

Posted for Hootin' Anni's musical meme

Thursday Theme Song,

the sing-along, toe-tappin' fun time for Thursday and the rest of the week!

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Mystery bush and flowers, as well as my Nanking Cherries in 'My World'

We don't have a beautiful garden, but I like to think we have a beautiful yard, because it is full of surprises. I love to plant trees, bushes and flowers, and I've forgotten the names of some of the things I planted a few years ago. In fact, the only one of these photos I can identify right now is the bottom one, and I didn't plant it. It was here when we moved in, and I used to call it "Kay's mystery bush" because it had beautiful blossoms every spring, followed by...nothing. That's right, until I found out it was a Nanking Cherry, and needed another bush nearby for pollination, it never had these lovely tart-sweet red cherries on it. Now I have the "old cherry bush" and the "new cherry bush" and also a volunteer cherry plant that doesn't seem to want to grow into a bush yet, but still produces fruit. Speaking of red berries, I don't remember the name of the bush in the top picture. I know it's right near my cotoneaster bush, and near one of my lilacs, but I don't remember its name. If anyone out there in the blogosphere can identify it by its flat green leaves, and by its berries with little "tufts" on the bottom, I'd sure love to know what it is. I'd also like to know the names of the dainty little blooms in the two center pictures.

Photos by Kay Davies.

Posted for the My World Tuesday meme.