Whatever the weather might choose to be doing, the flowering trees are going ahead with spring as planned. Their branches explode with tight clusters of flowers, big magnolias, sprays of cherry blossoms, and everywhere around here, fluffy crabapples.

Crabapple is such an ugly name for such a lovely tree, but that’s the name it’s got, so that’s the name it has.

I was thinking about the beauty of flowering trees. At one time, flowering trees meant fruit; now, of course, we have ornamental varieties. Maybe we always had ornamental varieties, only they weren’t being used for ornament, just going about their business, but I digress.

So I wondered if something like a flowering tree is, inherently, beautiful, or if we come to think of it as beautiful, after eons and eons of refining our humanity, because of what those flowers mean.

Is the concept of natural beauty ingrained within us? Is it something that we learn after grown-up after grown-up points to the flower-laden branches and says, “isn’t it beautiful?”

Who knows. Whatever the reason, their beauty is brief, so we should enjoy it while we can.

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