Weather Update

Last weekend, Dad and Marvis came back through here on their way home from spring break. They arrived late Saturday evening and left late Sunday morning. They were of course excited to see their grandson. But almost as exciting as that is what Dad saw outside as I was making pancakes for breakfast on Sunday morning.

We've had quite a cold snap over the past couple of weeks. We are well into spring so this has been very hard on all the plants. Before the cold snap the dogwoods were at their peak and we were about to see the azaleas bloom. Well, last Saturday night, it got down into the teens and killed all the azalea flowers. It also killed a lot of trees' leaves that were still small and tender. But the interesting thing was what happened to a poor crape myrtle on one side of our driveway.


Apparently the roots of the crape myrtle didn't get the message that it was cold, and kept pumping sap into the branches. Then the branches froze and cracked, and the sap kept oozing out and froze into these ribbons of ice. Dad had never seen anything like it, so he and Jeff took a whole bunch of pictures of it. Dad showed it to one of his colleagues last week, who referred him to this page with pictures of this phenomenon, also taken in Tennessee.

I think that the crape myrtle is probably dead, unfortunately. And our beautiful spring got wiped out. Plus we had to get out our winter clothes again. But it should be over soon (I hope).