Where I Live: Green

When I first visited America properly, it was on a trip to Virginia in 1995. And one of the things that struck me was how green everything was. Lawns seemed a darker, more vibrant green than in England and the trees more lush. The warm, humid climate and violent rainstorms that go with summer on the East Coast mean vegetation is rampant, and the type of grass that grows seems thicker and stronger than the delicate, pale green blades of UK lawns.

It's the same here - at least, in early summer. By August, everything is turning brown and dusty in the heat. But at the moment, everything is growing madly. The trees only came into leaf about two weeks ago, but they're now at their very lushest. Everywhere you go, you hear the hum of lawnmowers and smell fresh cut grass and there is new life wherever you look, from the goslings that came waddling up our drive one day to the little turtle we spotted in our local pond (top two right pics) The top picture with the huge oak is our front lawn, and the three on the bottom of the collage were taken at the new Native American plant garden at the New York Botanical Garden.

The prompt this week for Michelle's "Where I Live" blog at The American Resident is "Green". Michelle created a fabulous mosaic using Pic Monkey, so after fooling around and failing with HTML, I've tried the site out for the first time and created my own "masterpiece" in a slightly different style.