Neighborhood walk: green on green

I have a pretty cool neighborhood. It's not your typical neighborhood, with closely packed houses and cul-de-sacs and kids on bikes. Instead, the people who live here have small farms with horses and cows, llamas, and even some exotic birds (I can hear the peacocks from my place). On both sides of our place live bonafide master gardeners, which is great for inspiration.

Whenever I don't feel like straying too far from home, I take my walk on private road that leads to my farmhouse. It's beautiful all year, but especially right now, on the cusp between spring and summer. The road is lined with firs and maples and alders, volunteer rhododendrons in full bloom, hazelnut bushes and vine maples with bright new growth.

But it's the greenery close to the ground that caught my eye today. The bright green, newly opened leaves of the vine maple. The ferns with their curled new growth, just turning from white to pale green. The salmonberries in every stage of growth, bright rose blooms and caps in pale green and berries turning to ripe salmon pink. The hazelnut shrubs, with scattered nuts from last year's crop underneath. Tiny fragile flower stalks that I can't identify, but they're beautiful and are everywhere. The bushy spirea, with last year's dried flower stalks.

Today my ten minute walk today turned into an hour. An hour of loving the sun and blue skies, the ducks setting up housekeeping on the ponds, hawks soaring, the green hedgerows.