An interesting spring

It's been an unusual spring for us, with flowering foreshortened with overlap from normally early-flowering species flowering late because of the exceptionally cold winter, with later flowering species accelerated because of our warm February.  This is true of natives as well as ornamentals, interestingly.  Early flowers such as Hepatica are overlapping with mid-to-late spring species.  Odd.  An ornamental example is the Camellia Trail (at the South Carolina Botanical Garden, where I work); it's in full flower right now  -- normally, we'd see this in late February.

out the bedroom window

Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), though, is right on time. It's been a glorious year, and the trees outside are luminous in the morning. 

The surrounding white bracts (modified leaves) are the showy feature of dogwoods in 'flower' - the actual flowers are small and green, and borne in clusters surrounded by those bracts.

study view

I'm afraid my photos don't do justice to the wonderfully white appearance of these old dogwoods!