The City of Des Moines offered free trees and free planting for the curb strips in the 'hood. Many folks accepted. I declined because the tree, an upright, narrow pear tree (Pyrus calleyrana), sends its branches upward at such a steep angle, almost vertical, that many of them crowd the trunk and fail to attach themselves strongly.... ...see more

Halloween has long since come and gone but no time like the present for a memento of the night when kids and parents walk up to the homes of strangers, some of whom have made their yards look pretty strange.
Around the corner, Mel has huge birches in her side yard. Their trunks look like they're wrapped with paper that a typewriter... ...see more

Maureen and Sean next door inherited a foundation planting when they bought their house. The main plants? Shrubby yews and tall, narrow junipers (I think the cultivar is 'Wichita Blue'). Thanks to heavy, wet snows and ice storms the trees, which are eight feet tall, have sagged a bit, so the branches lean instead of reaching... ...see more

Bur Oaks are natives here in Iowa and they long since figured out how to survive droughts, heat, Arctic cold and squirrels. They put their energy into making mass, like a body builder. The rest is a lot of twigs at the end of muscle-bound branches. Lots of twigs=lots of acorns. Even with almost no rain. For example, the big one... ...see more

My town, Des Moines, has an entire city park devoted to lilacs, that is, the common lilac, Syringa vulgaris, the one in Walt Whitman's elegy for President Lincoln ("When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed..."). The lilacs are aged and need renewing. Still it's an amazing spot.
Meanwhile, all over town, long after the common lilacs... ...see more

Google has a sort-of-new search option that lets you upload a photo to find where it came from or what it shows. You upload your photo to a special site on Google and Google searches for photos with the same colors and shapes. Sometimes the results are way off, even funny (like a roller coaster in return for a photo of phlox),... ...see more