Thank you, Jen. Kept me from despair during the storm!

Thanks, Mindy! Now I just need to find out where the Siberian elm near my house is . . .

Thank you for the reference, Sondra! While I working on my tree book, I kept wishing I could find a book that showed photos of tree flowers and their buds. When I looked your recommendation up, I recognized the cover image; I must have taken it out of the library, but I suspect I wasn’t into tree flowers yet. (I just discovered that the introduction to Barnes and Wagner’s book is available online.) Tree flowers are tiny and mostly inaccessible to up-close examinations by a walker/hiker, but they are often startling in their details and variety. Fortunately, one can find images online.

In the next two weeks, the silver maples will be blooming. In 2020, the first month of the lockdown, I saw my first silver maple (a male) flower and wrote about it in my essay “The Flowering of 2020: The Silver Maple.” You can see an image of both male and female silver maple flowers here: https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/tree/silver-maple. (Be sure to click on each image to enlarge it.) “Minnesota Wildflowers: A Project for Environmental Justice” is a wonderful resource for finding information on trees as well as wildflowers and other plants.