Spring in my dining room

I put these branches in a vase after collecting them at a citizen science phenology training for Mount Auburn Cemetery.

They include: dogwood, magnolia, paper birch, sugar maple, silver maple, red oak,  and gingko (maidenhair tree).

The idea is that, in the warm indoor environment, you can watch them start to break their buds, bloom, and leaf out. I had no idea you could do this! Such a cool experiment. Like watching a lima bean sprout in a "pocket garden" (plastic baggie), this allows you to observe up-close the stages of plant reproduction. And it's just cool to witness the "aliveness" of plants, which seem static and unalive unless you are afforded this intimate look into the stages of their lives.

Yesterday as I journaled on my laptop, I paused for a minute in the midst of a thought, and my eyes wandered to the bouquet. Sure enough, the large silver maple branches buds looked curiously different. Their brown scales seemed to have stretched apart, revealing pale green flesh between their margins.

In our training, I had asked one of our leaders how we will know if a bud is breaking. He tried to describe it, but then conceded that each one will look different so it's hard to definitively say.

Now that I have this example on my dining table,  I realize now that the best answer to that question is first-hand observation, patiently, regularly, over time. This is what I valued so much when teaching science in the classroom. Questions that were asked of me that couldn't very easily be answered were always best answered by direct observation and experimentation.

So here I am, looking closely at the buds of a sugar maple, and answering my own questions. The "breaking" can be described as a stretching. And perhaps, I can sort of tell from some of the buds whose brown scales are falling away from the green flesh, the next step may be that the scales spread apart and fall away, leaving only the green flesh to continue growing and changing shape.

I honestly don't know what comes next: a flower? A leaf? Both? These simple questions, things I always thought I knew the answers to, are borne out by merely looking a little closer than I normally would at a living thing.

And further: this is just one species. How will the silver maple be different, for one? Their buds are wildly different: large clusters of red balls. Oh wow, just this moment I looked closer at those too, and they have burst open like little Christmas gifts, revealing a fuzzy red ball inside their brown pods. It's so easy to miss small details. All the more reason to slow down, stop, sit, and observe. And wonder.