This is an unashamedly seasonal picture: Highland Park is completely covered in white blossom, pale pink blossom, deep pink blossom, bright green leaves, deep pink leaves, daffodils, hyacinths, grape hyacinths, crocuses, tulips (plain, striped, feathered), narcissi, and cats on front porches. This is not an environmentally motivated photograph, just a celebratory one. What makes it very different from an English spring (and English landscape and the fringes of leafy suburbia is much on my mind, having just finished Howards End for a grad class tomorrow) is the violent suddenness with which it all happens.
Not that it was at all spring-like today - very cold, very wet - and indeed tomorrow night a quite definite frost is forecast - but the leaves were doing their very best to unfurl from the damp trees. I spent a very uncomfortable ten minutes or so trying to find the best way to take photographs of these soaked young leaves - a macro lens? a telephoto lens? flash? and diving indoors to change from one to the other. Some of the pictures ended up interestingly over-exposed, and gave off the impression that as well as rain there was a thick Scottish mist: this, however, just about conveys the idea that it looks as though it was quite hard work for the leaves to make it out for Easter.