The Garden Worm blog Digging up the best dirt on gardening!

There is something pretty magical about the light in early spring, late fall and winter. Call me crazy, but even though it’s cold and there isn’t a whole lot (if anything!) in bloom, these are my favorite times to be outside and just breathe. This is a close-up of a freebie in late-afternoon spring – one of those ten free trees from the Arbor Day Foundation that I got when I was starving for anything green at our last house. Since the yard was a postage stamp and we were renting, most of the ten ended up at friend’s houses or simply as “puppy-dog-mulch” from our two canine chipper-shredders. This one survived its infancy in a pot, and while we now have a larger lot, it is still urban sized and the tree is probably too big for it. Still, I love the bark and its shape and the way its leaves dance in the wind. I believe it’s a river birch (though with free things, who knows for sure – horticulturists out there??), fairly apt for a house in a city of three rivers.