Hold off a little longer, green!

That's something I never expected to say! As much as I believe the desert is beautiful, I usually put green and growing at the top of my list of what is valuable in landscape. But that was before I lived somewhere with redbud trees. These are such jewels in the already lovely landscape of Austin. They burst into bloom in the earliest part of spring and last a beautifully long time. But my favorite thing about them is the seeming determination in the way the flowers emerge directly from the trunk.

It has been more than a week since the bradford pear tree, already covered in new leaves, lost its flowers in a sudden and highly localized snowfall of white petals. I want the redbud's green to wait as long as possible before it covers the fuchsia flowers.