There’s been a lot of tree-related excitement at our house this week. It seems awfully coincidental that I’ve been working on a story about a dryad… 🙂

We’ve added a Spring Snow crabapple by our garden. It will eventually shade part of the garden for at least part of the day, but that’s okay. This variety makes white flowers in the spring, and doesn’t make any fruit at all. I’m very excited about the new addition!

I’m actually excited about all our new trees and plants. We had our backyard completely redone last year – our sprinkler system had only partially worked for years, which of course meant we had big patches of dirt in our yard. And that in turn meant that when it rained we had two very muddy border collies… Now we have a lovely yard with grass that not only looks great, but also doesn’t need as much water as other varieties. I regularly walk around the yard and talk to the bushes and the trees, and tell them how great of a job of growing they’re doing. 🙂

Yesterday I watched a bee take a piece of a leaf from our redbud, and I was sure I’d imagined it, because since when do bees carry away pieces of leaves? This morning one of the guys from the tree company came out (a branch on one of our much older trees was broken by heavy winds last week, and needs to be pruned before it falls off and damages what’s beneath it…), and he saw the leaves of the redbud and said: you have leafcutter bees. I really did see a bee rip off a circle of a leaf and fly away with it! How cool is that?!?

Jasper and Rosie are unimpressed with the bees, but they do like playing in the yard, lying on the patio and, of course, digging in their favorite hole. We just put the dirt back when they’re done, which works great for them because they can lie in the cool dirt of their hole on hot days, and then dig the hole again after we fill it up.

In addition to all the fun tree goings-on over the past week, I was interviewed for a writing podcast last week for the first time ever. It was fun and exciting and only a little scary. 🙂 I’ll post more about it when I know when the episode is going to air. On the podcast I committed to finally publishing a non-fiction book I’ve poked at for a very long time, so I will be working on that as soon as I finish writing two more stories, wrap up a slew of edits, and make a book cover or two. The one good thing is that my day job gives us not one but two days off for the Fourth of July holiday this year, so I’m going to take a vacation day and have five whole days in a row to write – and to play with Rosie and Jasper!