A Mother's Day Gift

It is the second week on May and here in the mountains of Vermont the serviceberries are blooming...like snow in springtime...a perfect Mother’s Day gift from Mother Nature!

Serviceberries...several different species in the genus Amelanchier...are my absolute favorite small trees. They are the perfect size for gardens; in spring they are covered with delicate white blossoms; and in fall their leaves turn a gorgeous shade of burnt orange. 
 
Serviceberries naturally grow as understory trees...meaning they are happy with less light. Around here they absolutely thrive in the partial sun at the edge of the woods alongside our road. For most of the year they go unnoticed. But for two weeks in early May they become the stars of the neighborhood.

Serviceberries flower early, before their taller forest companions have leafed out. It is an unforgettable sight, looking down our winding dirt road on a misty spring morning, to see a lacy white veil peeking out from under the still leafless canopies of the maples and ash.

I also have a group of four Amelanchier canadensis...the smallest of the tree-sized serviceberries...growing in the shade behind our woodshed. And today...Mother’s day’... they are just perfect.

 And every year, as I anticipate the flowering of our native serviceberries, A.E.Houseman’s famous poem, The Loveliest of Trees, about the wild cherry of his English woods, runs through my head.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide. 

Now of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more. 

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

I do not have fifty more springs to enjoy...so I will live in the present and make the most of each and every spring as it is given to me. And each spring I cherish the beauty of our New England serviceberry, also ‘hung with snow’.

Comments

[commonweeeder]

I ordered 5 Serviceberries from our Conservation district, but they are tiny tiny seedlings, and don't look too promising in general. I've put them in a nursery bed and have hopes that one spring soon we too will have early spring bloom on the bough.

[Judith Irven]

Don't give up on them. Try to keep the weeds from smothering them when they are small. Over time it can be helpful to keep the total number of stems to a reasonable number (say between three and ten) by prune out extra side stems. otherwise the whole thing gets to be a bit of a jumble in the center.
Good luck with them...Judith