Gratitude Monday: Blooming summer

One of the benefits of being a Leo baby—to offset the flop-on-the-floor hot weather that afflicts the world north of the Equator—is that, if you live in the right places, you get a month-long festive environment, courtesy of crape myrtle trees.

When Lagerstroemia is really strutting its stuff, it produces great fluffy clouds of intense colors. The flowers appear in clusters, which makes them different from, say, cherry or dogwood.

  

But a tree in full bloom blurs the distinct clusters and gives the impression of an integrated explosion of color.

And—unlike cherry and dogwood—the flowers last for several weeks.

Crape myrtle blooms come in white, pale pink, fuchsia, red and a kind of pale bluish-purple. Around the Valley they call Silicon, no one seems to have used the white ones.

Where I grew up in LA, crape myrtle was obviously a popular landscaping element; the trees would start to bloom around the beginning of August. In Virginia, where they compete with both dogwood and cherry, it began earlier in July, but there was still a lot of color left for early August. Here in NorCal, where it’s also found all over the Valley they call Silicon, we’re back on the August schedule, which makes my neighborhood walks enjoyable.

You find them in front yards, in commercial parking lots (plenty of them in the Sunnyvale Public Library parking lot), parks. Not in the wild—they’ve obviously been introduced as some kind of welcome-to-paradise statement.

But however they got here, I’m grateful they are, and in such abundance.