In addition to the Gunnera whose photos I've posted in the Seen around town now thread (posting #32), I found two trees of timely interest in the nearby Carolinian Forest. The first one is Aesculus pavia, which I see Wikipedia says is also known as known as Red Buckeye or Firecracker Plant. More of the flowers should be open for the June 13 noon-hour lecture/walk. The leaves are just emerging on the Taxodium distichum, bald cypress, so you can easily see how they're arranged in a spiral around the branch, yet they all point up and will appear to be in a flat plane when they open.
It's a whole year later, but here are the fruits on the Aesculus pavia. This is the same accession as the one I posted last year, but not the same individual - in a different bed in the Carolinian Garden.
Red Buckeye, yes; Firecracker Plant, no. Find me one textbook that actually calls it by the latter. Another example of the idiocy prevailing at wikipedia that all English names must be treated equally, even when they aren't. That's Taxodium ascendens. The label derives from its treatment by conservative botanists as just a variety T. distichum var. imbricatum, even though the two are quite distinct.
