Recently in fruit Category

The stoplight trees - that were red, yellow, and green back in September - are now all done! All the leaves are gone from all three trees.

Here's their transformation in the last couple of weeks....


October 16th

Two weeks ago, there were still leaves on all three trees. The left tree was full of fruit (brownish red samaras) and the tree on the right was still yellowing.

The stoplight trees continue their colorful tribute to traffic control and, amazingly, the girl ash tree (on the left) just keeps getting redder and redder.



Now that she's lost a lot of her leaves, I can see that the red isn't in fact coming from the leaves at all. It's the fruit!

Look at all the leaves that have fallen off the girl ash tree down the street! She's looking pretty bare these days.



But she is still holding on to that fruit!



Unlike the ash, the maples are beginning to let their samaras fall.



And I've even spotted a few chestnuts on the ground!



The chestnut leaves are soooooo brown and shriveled now!



And the maple leaves are looking pretty yucky too.



Which makes me wonder: which goes first the seeds or the leaves? My girl ash tree is all about dumping her leaves right now, but she's still got her fruit, whereas the maples and the chestnut aren't dropping that many leaves, but the fruit is starting to go. Why drop your leaves first? Why hold on to them? Do maple seeds ripen faster than ash tree seeds? Do maple leaves last longer than ash tree leaves?

Even the honey locusts, which were so late to get leaves, are finally acknowledging the arrival of fall. I've spotted some yellow leaves up in the canopy.

Lookie what's ripening on the trees!

Now that we've checked in on my ash tree and on the chestnut down the street, let's see what the kooky honey locusts have been up to. Last time, I was starting to get confused/frustrated that I had yet to see any fruit on the honey locusts. I was eager to see if they had started to develop fruit after our month-long vacation.

Soon after we returned from our vacation, I happened to walk past the horse chestnut tree that I was watching in the spring. I was in a hurry, so I wasn't looking up at the tree. I was just rushing by looking down and I saw a chestnut! It was green and still on the small side, but it was a chestnut. I didn't have my camera with me (doh!) so I had to come back a couple of days later to take a picture of the tree's progress.

Finally, I managed to take a walk down the street with the camera to check in on the girl ash tree. She is looking quite different than my boy ash these days. My boy tree has no fruit of course, but she has lots of dangling clusters of samaras.

I have ash tree fruit literally falling at my feet!



My daughter and I spotted this branch lying in the street right in front of our car. That side of the street is home to a large maple tree and a male ash tree (like mine), but I quickly noticed that this was a female ash tree with twigs full of developing fruit. The only female ash tree around is all the way across the main street. I don't know how this branch got over to me, except perhaps that it knew that I would be the only person in the neighborhood who would be thrilled to find it lying there!

My daughter helped hold it up so I could take a few pictures of it. (Can you find her in there? She was very helpful this time, but she is getting a little tired of my enthusiasm for trees. When we are out walking, I'll often stop and point out something interesting about a tree. She will look inquisitively and listen thoughtfully and then say worriedly, "Don't take a picture of the tree!" A few days ago, she was telling daddy that she was a very nice girl. Her proof: "I let mommy take pictures of trees." Passers-by were confused.)

 

So anyway, look at all that fruit!! We snapped off a small twig so we could bring it home and take a closer look at the fruit.  

Remember the beautiful flowers of the horse chestnut tree down the street?



I walk by the tree when I bring my kids to school each morning and pick them up every afternoon. After having seen how quickly other trees had lost their flowers, I'd been watching the lovely blooms of this tree to see how long they'd last and what would happen next. Early this month, the tree began losing its flowers.



But, interestingly, just the red ones. While the flowers with red centers were shriveling up and falling off, forming piles under the tree, those with yellow centers were still on their stems. The white petals with their eyelash-like thingies were falling away, leaving only yellow-green balls with a single filament sticking out. Five days later, there were no more signs of the red flowers at all.



So, are these the female flowers? Is this the fruit developing? You know, I've seen pictures of chestnuts where the spiny outer casing is green, just like these little things.



Are these little flower centers the beginning of chestnuts? They sure look like it!

Time to check in with our girl down the street to see how she's doing with our ash tree fruit. (You may recall that the tree I'm watching is a male tree, so I have to visit the female tree on the next block to watch this part of the process.) On May 21st, I was able to spot a few of the female flowers just beginning to grow long leaf-like fruit.