Nothing marks early fall more than my maroon chrysanthemum in bloom.

I played detective to determine what kind of tree this is that grows in my neighbor’s front yard. I had photographed it last June when it had all those white floppy petals. Now it has these orange hanging balls.

I typed “white flowers petals orange balls” and “big petals white flowers tree” into Google. That second search brought me to a forum of plant identification, and someone suggested “cornus kousa.” The rest was easy; I put that phrase in Google images, and up came both my petals and my orange bally “fruit.”

• Cornus kousa fruit
• White flowers of cornus kousa
• Japanese flowering dogwood

To learn what is going on in nature in other neighborhoods, visit Rambling Woods:

Periwinkle is growing on the side of my house: it’s a great ground cover for shady spots.

The lilac blooms have already fallen off my neighbor’s bush. They don’t last long.

The dogwood flowers are such a pleasure to view in bloom.

Dancing Dogwood Watercolor

For more flowers, visit Today’s Flowers:

My neighbors had their house painted red recently, an appealing color next to the foliage in their backyard. The blue garage, white umbrella and deck belong to the neighbors further down.

The leaves of their dogwood tree, that I photographed last spring, looks so pretty with its red autumn hues.

Wednesday seems like a good day to put up a post for Ruby Tuesday!

Welcome to the modern world. If you can play with a painting in Photoshop, why not? I applied the palette knife filter to my gouache painting (that painting did have a bit of watercolor in the background, too, by the way). I then un-applied the filter to the spot that had my signature.

Goache on paper, 2008

Here are the flowers on my neighbor’s dogwood tree.

Here’s the whole dogwood tree.

I learned from Gail that the cherry trees bloom first, and then the dogwoods show their flowers.