Raintree country*

We have our wettest-in-history-September, I presume, to thank for the gorgeous blooms and bracts that have been showing up on raintrees around my neighborhood. I rather suspect that the last few summers, being as dry as they've been, have kept these showy beauties from reaching their full potential, since their lavish production this year has really caught my eye.

There seem to be a lot of these trees around, too, and, going by my experience of how easily they sprout volunteers, I can't help but wonder how many are scions of the one in our backyard...

the one on the other side of the fence is most certainly one of our "children"

...which was, in turn, volunteered from one in my Mom's backyard in Houston. I think that might be the parent tree next to my parent, very early in its life, the skinny sapling you can barely see at the left here:

Whether Mom is ultimately responsible for the profusion of raintrees around here or not, they surely were pretty a week or so ago.

And not just as trees, either, but also as their golden largess coated many surfaces, including the canoe that's regularly stored in our backyard:

Normally, "yellow snow" doesn't have a pleasant connotation, but when the "snow" is made up of these lovely blossoms...

...it makes for a very attractive decoration, whether in the street or on a canoe:

You have to look quick to get the best effect of the raintrees' blossoms, but their aesthetic contribution to the neighborhood scene doesn't stop there. For every blossom, there's a handsome russet bract soon after, and these stick around a little longer...

one of my biggest volunteers, showing off her bracts

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*I've always remembered raintrees because of what must have been a very striking movie ad I once saw for this flick (I was a big fan of the young Elizabeth Taylor in my youth); I never saw the movie, but thought a call-back to it made a nice post title .