The pink petals of my neighbor’s dogwood are showing off.

Yesterday I spotted this robin in a tree. Do you think he spotted me?

Today in the gray I saw two birds in a tree – the left bottom one is a robin. Can’t make out the right one – he’s so far off! Michelle suspects the one on the right is a “she” robin – the males have the brighter breast. Mating season?

We still have a bunny rabbit living in our backyard.

For more Nature Notes:

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:

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:

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.

Here’s the whole dogwood tree.

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

See my dogwood painting.