Memorial Day flowers and trees

I hope everyone in the area did okay with the storms last night. Some of our new plants are looking pretty shredded from the hail we got, but I think they will all recover.

We wouldn't ordinarily go to the Missouri Botanical Garden on a holiday, but since it was an iffy weather day, we figured everyone else would stay home so we went. We had a burning question: What is this tree? It's in our new yard and, for the first time since we've moved in, we noticed it was blooming.

We took a sample of the leaves and flowers to the Plant Doctor desk at the Kemper Center for Home Gardening. The lady at the desk identified it for us immediately: yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea. She did say that they are fairly rare, so it wasn't so surprising that we weren't able to identify it ourselves. We also learned when we looked it up at home that it only blooms in alternate years, so we didn't need to feel badly about missing the flowers last year -- we thought we'd been awfully oblivious to what was going on in our yard to have missed these long droopy flowers.

Of course, once we were at the Garden, we spent the next few hours wandering around, never mind that we were just there on Friday.

The peonies were pretty battered by last night's storm, but we found some that were still looking perky.

The most unusual find of the day came courtesy of a couple who had sat long enough in the English Woodland Garden to spot the foxes and pointed them out to us. We'd seen the sign that said "don't feed the foxes," so we knew they were in there, but had never seen them. We saw three running around today once we knew where to look.