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Sunday, March 23, 2008

Happy Easter

Donna at the Treasure Chest has been pouring coffee for Northport for the last couple of months, providing a warm welcome, hot breakfasts, and always a surprise or twenty in the décor. Here we have the first forced forsythia of the season. Am I going out on a limb if I guess that these branches were brought in by neighbor Pat Scott?

Named for horticulturalist William Forsyth, doesn’t it stand to reason there would be a festival somewhere for this bright spring-flowering shrub? I can recall driving back through northern Florida and Georgia about this time of year, reveling in the flowers, some towns all forsythia, some roads lined for miles with blooming redbud, so I’m not surprised to find a Forsythia Festival in Forsyth, Georgia. It even included a used book sale! Alas, it was weeks ago—and that was there, we were here….

The farm eggs I buy have brown shells: no brightly colored eggs for Easter here. We have no little ones in residence, anyway. Instead of emptying a basket, therefore, we’ll take a ramble over hill and field, inspecting twigs for incipient buds.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think we should have a forsythia festival, too. It won't be the FF, of course, but I don't care, I'm longing for something fresh. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can find a greenhouse that'll let me sneak in . . .

P. J. Grath said...

Did you know that forsythia is in the olive family? Let's just NOT have an autumn olive festival! That shrub is the new scourge of the North.

I do have evidence at hand (right next to me) that the buds at the tops of the trees are opening, as one popple tree in our grove had fallen over, the catkin-like buds opening like pussywillows. Wouldn't have seen it from the ground without binoculars.

Susan Och said...

We always dye brown eggs for Easter. You use the lighter ones for blue and green and the darker ones for the warm colors. They make some really pretty colors.