Another picture of a flowering plant that I can’t accurately identify. At least not with any degree of horticultural precision. I mean, I can point at it and say “Hey, that’s the same kind of tree that grows around the circle drive outside the hospital!” but I can’t tell you what kind of tree it is.
All I know is that if Barbara Walters asked me what kind of tree I’d like to be, this wouldn’t be it.
The flowers are very pretty when it’s in full bloom, and when the wind blows they detach in flurries. It looks like a spring blizzard. But it smells like something small and unclean crawled up in the branches and died.
Over the summer, little purplish berries will develop where the flowers were. Nothing I know of eats them. They rot on the branches and slough off, leaving a sticky mass on the sidewalks. The pits are almost perfectly spherical, and they act like ball bearings under the feet of unwary visitors. Sometimes the hospital maintenance staff will put down extra floor mats near the doors in the hope that people will wipe their feet before tracking purple stains all over the floors.
In the fall and winter, the trees become home to hundreds of birds. The purple mess on the ground is quickly replaced by a different sort of mess, and the decomposing stench has a similar change…
Still, for a few weeks in the spring, the flowers look quite nice.