Here is the view from the window as I write. You can see it’s about to rain:
When I was a student, Columbia University’s graduation was always about May 10. All the cherry blossom would be out on the main walk east-west across the campus, at 116th Street. It was a beautiful sight. When I moved here the blossom would come out a couple of weeks later, but we’re catching up — thanks to global warming, I suppose. Now it’s cleared up, I’ll go outside.
Last Autumn I bought ten pots of unexciting-looking, half-dead cowslips very cheaply at a garden centre. That’s the time to buy things in bulk. Now they look wonderful again:
Misty seems fond of the blossom:
She loves the morello cherries, I bet she’s thinking of those:
This is what she’s looking at:
A Bad Guide 
Gorgeous Spring photos. They make me wish we were having a real Autumn, so that I could look forward to Spring. I’m not going to say whose fault it is, but it sure feels like climate change is real.
I love the different expressions in Misty’s eyes – in one it seems like wistful contemplation of something far away, in the other very direct focus on the Tantalus-like nature of her situation.
As an aside, someone from Norway just clicked on the email link on my page. Unfortunately they didn’t notice that the address is munged. In case that someone was you, try the address I use here.
That was me!!! I was admiring all your links. I wasn’t trying to send an email, I was just interested in the ‘remove the B’ instruction.
it was just luck that I caught that expression of Misty’s. I thought it was great too.
Here in East Angular our morello blossom is over but our cowslips are looking much like yours.
Last year we bottled our morellos in a mixture of brandy and kirsch: recommended.
Gorgeous shots! Makes me want to visit my mother’s ancestral homeland.
It’s through my mother, who grew up in East Anglia, that I got interested in cowslips. This autumn I’m going to get more.
Most of our morellos go to the birds and goats, but it seems a bit of a waste. I’ll try your recipe. We did make a liqueur with some other cherries, and it was delicious.
You’d certainly be welcome here.
Mind your Language.
[An English series.]
Wow. Mr. Crown, you and Mrs Crown and Alma (and the menagerie) live in heaven. It’s so beautiful! I also like Misty’s thoughtful gaze.
Here in Moscow we had one of our 3-day springs. Day #1: Bare branches. Day #2: Buds. Day #3: Bright pale green leaves everywhere.
There are tulips in bloom, but the lilacs are waiting; they know this glorious weather might yet turn into snow.
That’s funny it happens so fast in Moscow, here it is sooo slow. I had 47 tulips coming up, but Misty ate six or seven. I’m hoping the rest are going to bloom before the fall.
Sometimes we have horrible jumps of temperature. This year it was around 9 degrees for weeks, and then it went to 25 degrees in 24 hours. It sounds fun, but it isn’t. The poor trees and bushes don’t know what hit them — and neither do the residents.
And then there’s the pukh.
Yeah, the pukh is a killer. It’s quite lovely — the paths in the park accross the street from my house seem to be covered with fluffy snow — but it’s hell for allergy sufferers. And even if you don’t have allergies, you walk down the street spitting and snorting after inhaling the stuff.
My mother’s tulips were in full show at Easter; here they are a week or two later along with all the plum brush and fruit trees. Now the lilacs are in bloom.
AJP: As you are probably not reading that other thread any more, I’ll take the liberty of replying here about the Frick:
It’s nice, but I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Perhaps if you’d said ‘The most wonderful small art gallery on earth’, we’d recognise the voice of a true New Yorker.
Ah, but then I not a true anything, being a Sydneysider, then a Parisian, now a Londoner each for about 20 years or so. And I’ll defend the Frick against any other such gallery in each voice, cobber …
The Frick is probably my favorite small museum ever. When I first moved to NYC I spent hours there — I think it was only $2, about what I could afford, and the collection was small enough I could get to know each item intimately. It gave me a better education in art history than I got in college.
We complained when they moved the four Sargent portraits from their stunning position in the oval room to be lost in the next large gallery, and lo, the next time we went, they back !
When we were in NYC with our 14-year old fashion-mad niece, we walked with her up and down Madison to look at the boutiques, but on condition we went to the Frick at “half-time.” That, we said, was part of the education of a well-brought-up young lady.
We were delighted that she loved it, as it was not obvious she would. So she got lunch at the Donna Karen salad bar ….
Our lilac won’t be out for several weeks yet.
Paul! Thanks for stopping by. Of course I wondered if you were that Paul, but I couldn’t remember your mentioning having spent time in NY — and why should you? — but, at any rate, I figured you were some other, New York Paul.
I think the Frick is a great space, and with its courtyard one of the pleasantest places to spend time in the middle of Manhattan. And I like the Sargent portraits; as well as being beautifully executed they reinforce the feeling that the museum was once a family’s home. So Sargent’s a Good Thing, but — and as Language implies in his comment — it’s more that it’s hard to knock any institution with that many Rembrandts and Vermeers in its collection. I’m less provoked, now that I know it was you writing ‘the greatest’, but I’ll still point out that there are some other wonderful small museums. If you’re a Londoner, the Arab Hall at Leighton House always used to be pretty great to visit on a warm day. It would be silly to exclude the John Soane Museum from any “greatest” list, too. I would say they’re all wonderful experiences, and (whereas Rembrandt is a better painter than Sargent) why say one is better than the others? They are just different.
My daughter was born in NYC, and we took her back there a couple of years ago. All this sounds very familiar.