Dancing Under Falling Tree Blossom

My love of blossom started when I was a little girl, way before I was conscious of noticing other flowers.

There was an amazing old cherry tree at the bottom of our road and when the blossom started to fall, my friend and I would head off down there.

As the wind blew, the blossom came down in clouds of paper thin, pink petals. We danced around pretending it was confetti and we were bride’s marrying our Prince Charming’s.

The years past by and I married my Prince Charming, although I had to put up with paper confetti as I didn’t marry in the spring!

I still love the blossom at this time of year, watching the trees come back to life. I can’t help stopping to photograph it when I’m out and about.

There seems to be more of it this year, I don’t know if having so much rain last autumn has caused the trees to produce more potential fruit.

The colour ranges from white, to the merest hint of pink in apple blossom. The most common seems to be mid-pink, but it goes through to the darkest pink.

I now have my own Blossom

These days I’m lucky enough to have my own trees to produce blossom. It starts in March with the three non-edible Prunus ‘Pissardii Nigra’ trees along the woodland border.

As they come out so early they do occasionally get snowed on, like this year, amazingly it doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Pears are first

A month later, the beginning of April and the edible fruit trees start to flower, with the two pears out first. They are desert pears ‘Louise Bonne of Jersey’ and ‘Beth’ and they are mouth wateringly scrumptious!

I do get excited when the blossom starts to open on my fruit trees, because ’points might mean prizes’ but flowers mean fruit!

My excitement is always tinged with a small amount of concern though, that the dreaded ‘late frost’ will come and harm them.

Despite lots of April showers, the sun continued to shine and just a few short days after the pears had started, most of the fruit trees tentatively began to open their flowers too.

Most exciting of all, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, was a little blossom on the newly planted Victoria plum, I have high hopes.

As the apples ripen in succession, so the blossom does too, but… You would expect the blossom to come out in the same order, but no, ‘Discovery our first ripening apple is the last to flower. I don’t know if this is normal or just peculiar to our kitchen garden.

Most disappointing is our apple ‘Winter Gem’, it has had no blossom this year which means no apples. It must be the major chop I gave it, but it was needed as it was getting a bit out of hand.