Spring haircut

An arborist came scouting the neighbourhood with his crew for some yard work and noticed residual storm damage in a couple of our large trees.  The marketing terminology is widow makers;a  partially broken branch can cause serious injuries when cascading onto an unsuspecting person walking underneath.  He only got the job because he caught Ron at home rather than me - I had a couple of bad experiences with shady contractors when we first moved to the U.S - although I will admit the trees look much better and it's not a job I would have liked to do.  Considering the height of the taller sycamore which at a wild guess is about 100ft (33m), necessitating a significant climb up into the tree, my thoughts last year of tackling that very task were completely unrealistic.

 This picture doesn't even give you the perspective of how high up the tree climbing/chain-sawing fella was.  In fact, looking out of my bedroom window which is a second storey window, I had to peer upwards to find him among the branches.  This shows him pretty far out from the main trunk.

  One would want to be confident about the quality of the safety ropes!

 No residual tree damage here though; just perpetual blossoms from our two Dogwoods flanking the Japanese Maple.  The arborist told us that the low rainfall this spring has caused the flowering trees to keep their blossoms for a longer period of time. 

 Here's an alternate shot with the late afternoon sun casting shadows.  At dusk the white blossoms take on a hue similar to what Iceberg roses do at dusk; something we loved about that particular rose we planted in our Christchurch garden.

Just in case you didn't see them properly in the last picture!  Amazingly, that's just a sample of our spring showcase.  I wouldn't think of boring you with every flowering plant/shrub/bulb located in our yard.