Bad News/Good News?

When it comes to gardener bloggers, we preferentially feature breathtaking close-up shots of blooms demonstrating evidence of our plans-gone-right.  I suspect if anybody is counting, bloom shots would represent fully 99 percent of bloggers' carefully curated post images.

I don't recall seeing many, if any, photos of folk's dead trees.

I get it, I'm personally not all that interested in spending time online viewing sere limbs reaching up into relentlessly sunny skies.  If that is the sort of scenery I admire?  I've got only to raise the shades and look out back, where recently, rapidly, without warning and for no reason we can discern, one of our prized Mountain Laurel trees simply gave up the ghost.

I wanted to commemorate the event in some way, losing a mature tree is significant.  But I didn't want to do that featuring the photographic equivalent of a death mask.  Again, downer with a capital D, none of us needs more of that.

So......Ta da!  I call this masterwork "The dead tree's reflection on the water out back" or alternately, "Golden, On the Pond" (with apologies to Ernest Thompson).

Yes, for those of you keeping score, the tree dying is/was the bad news.  The good news, at least the good news I am hoping will come to pass, is that the increased sunlight coming in where the tree used to throw shade, will stimulate our Tropicana cannas to set blooms this season.

Earlier this season I tried threatening said cannas (raised fist, "BLOOM!" in what was supposed to be a commanding tone) and that didn't work for beans.  I suppose that is yet another technique that will remain safely in the realm of a professional nurseryman's secrets, how to successfully "force" plants to flower.

And yes, yes, if I was more patient or even perhaps a more clever blogger I'd wait until after the cannas bloomed so I could share that breathtaking close-up with you here to bookend the post.

I am so not that person.