Cypress Trees

One of the things Mark has done is have the foresight to recognize that we'll get new neighbors sometime in the next year or two and to plant some visual buffers--cypress trees--between our yards.  Our old neighbor was a few years younger than my grandmother, and it showed in her gardening.  I want to say that she was something like 94 and still working hard in her garden until she slipped at the local market and broke her hip.  She had all sorts of great looking plants.

I brought the camera's macro lens to bare on the cypresses.  Normally what I notice about them is that they seem to like the high clay-content soil we have around here and they're getting taller.  I hadn't noticed that they also make little pine cones.  So I took some photos of them.

It wasn't until I got the photos on a bigger screen that I saw how pine cones are like flowers.  I'd always thought of pine cones as something really different from flowers, but these teeny guys look just like woody rose buds.  And I guess it's where the seeds come from.  (OK. Maybe they're like corn....)

The other cool thing about this shot is how modular the leaves are.  This zoomed in, leaves look like they could come from a Monkey Puzzle Tree.