flowering trees and politics

It was breezy today, and petals from our neighbors' crabapple tree have been flying by in blizzards, so the glory of the flowering trees is already waning. Our own cherry tree's blossoms have gotten paler, but they're still attached.

I'm still enjoying the garden book:  About A Gardener's Book of Plant Names (1963), by A.W. Smith, a British military man who later settled in New England - "Under PINE, he reminds us that in the seventeenth century all the noble New England white pines whose trunks measured twenty-four inches or more were marked as Crown property and were cut and transported to England to be used as ships' masts, and that as a consequence it is seldom that a pine board wider than twenty-three inches is found in early New England houses. He reminds us, too, that this confiscation was one of the many causes of dissatisfaction leading to the Revolution."

And, about the first named variety of apple in America, the Blaxton's Yellow Sweeting: "was introduced around 1640 by the Reverend William Blaxton, one of the best gardeners of his day, he also trained a bull to the saddle and used it to ride around Boston on his daily business."

I got to see Darkest Hour, which has brought me to pick up Boris Johnson's The Churchill Factor again.

Churchill:  "...it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..." Yes.