Last week the trees put on their best apparel, all decked out in flowers. The weather was fine – not cold like today. Here are some memories from last week’s beautiful weather, captured on my cell phone camera.

An apple tree in full bloom behind WQED’s offices. It looked lovely and smelled sweet, the quintessential flowering tree.

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A London plane tree in Greenfield sporting red and green balls. The balls are covered with the tree’s tiny flowers. When the flowers are fertilized, the balls become seeds that break up and float away in the wind the following spring.

This tree is a hybrid of the Oriental plane tree and American sycamore. Many of them were planted in Pittsburgh more than 100 years ago because they are very tolerant of air pollution.

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A sugar maple in full flower. From below, its flowers look like fluffy, pale green, hanging leaves but they are actually bunches of small flowers suspended on long stems. They are pollinated by both insects and wind.

And yes, the pollen count was high last week.

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