Some spring pic-spam
Apr. 5th, 2014 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cairistionaMy White Tree is blooming nicely today!
It's actually a serviceberry, or Amelanchier, a member of the rose family. It's a smallish tree (our biggest one, shown here, is about 30 feet tall). We have quite a few of them blooming in our woods, most much smaller than this one, which is the largest and the one that opens its white cloud of flowers first each year.
The origin of the common name is kind of interesting. Folklore historians, as well as people who actually live in Appalachia and know the reason for the name, say that in the 19th century, it bloomed around the same time as the roads cleared enough for the circuit-riding preachers to come through and hold services. Another, more macabre, reason: people cut the blooming branches to carry into the church for funeral "services" for people who had died over the winter but who had yet to be buried because the ground hadn't yet thawed.
In my region of the Ozarks, the tree is still called "sarvis", which is the old English pronunciation (and I'd bet dollars to donuts that no one around here realizes that's where the pronunciation comes from and that, at least with that particular word, they're speaking old English.) Some linguists say "sarvis" comes from early American settlers who, upon seeing the native American tree, likened it to the unrelated serviceberry (sorbus torminalis) that grows in England and Europe.
I just know that, by any other name, it's still my favorite spring-flowering tree.
It's actually a serviceberry, or Amelanchier, a member of the rose family. It's a smallish tree (our biggest one, shown here, is about 30 feet tall). We have quite a few of them blooming in our woods, most much smaller than this one, which is the largest and the one that opens its white cloud of flowers first each year.
The origin of the common name is kind of interesting. Folklore historians, as well as people who actually live in Appalachia and know the reason for the name, say that in the 19th century, it bloomed around the same time as the roads cleared enough for the circuit-riding preachers to come through and hold services. Another, more macabre, reason: people cut the blooming branches to carry into the church for funeral "services" for people who had died over the winter but who had yet to be buried because the ground hadn't yet thawed.
In my region of the Ozarks, the tree is still called "sarvis", which is the old English pronunciation (and I'd bet dollars to donuts that no one around here realizes that's where the pronunciation comes from and that, at least with that particular word, they're speaking old English.) Some linguists say "sarvis" comes from early American settlers who, upon seeing the native American tree, likened it to the unrelated serviceberry (sorbus torminalis) that grows in England and Europe.
I just know that, by any other name, it's still my favorite spring-flowering tree.
