This weekend let’s go out and look for trees that are flowering. Whether you walk around the block or visit an arboretum, I bet you are going to discover more than you realize.
Certainly you are going to find trees with beautiful, colorful showy flowers like this desert willow. The buckeyes, horse chestnuts, tulip trees, catalpas, magnolias and fruit trees all have attractive flowers.
Do you have any ideas who might come to visit these flowers? In our desert willow we regularly have hummingbirds and carpenter bees. We’ve also noticed tiny birds, called verdins, poking around the flowers. The hummingbirds are collecting nectar, the bees collect pollen and nectar, and we aren’t sure what the verdins are after. They are probably drinking nectar, but they also catch insects. In the summer they love to eat the tomatoes in our garden. We forgive them though, because they are so tiny and cute.
You might have trouble spotting the flowers on certain trees, like this mesquite. They form catkins that don’t have petals, so may not look like flowers at all. Insects often pollinate trees with big, showy flowers; trees with small flowers may be wind pollinated.
Other tree flowers may be oddly shaped or peculiar compared to annual flowers. Check out the bell-shaped flowers from a bottle tree (Brachychiton populneum). From the side the flowers are whitish, and are hard to see. Facing the flower, however, the interior is dark red.
If you have studied flower parts, then tree flowers can offer some challenges. Sometimes trees will only have male flowers or only female flowers. Mulberries are examples of trees that have separate sexes. One tree will be female and produce fruit and seeds; another will be male and produce only pollen.
It’s a good idea to jot down the date when you see trees in bloom. Recording the time of bloom gives information about phenology or dates of reoccurring natural phenomena. This information can then be used to study how plants respond to such things as weather and climate changes. Each tree has it’s own time to bloom and over the years you will see patterns.
If you can’t get outdoors, or you are interested in seeing more photographs of trees, check out the beauties at Julie Walton Shaver’s Tree Growers Diary. The Autumn in the Land Movie is particularly worthwhile if you love trees.
