What a Morning! Pawpaw Blossoms

At the end of April, I walked into the yard one morning and the sun was hitting the pawpaw blossoms just right. What does it mean for the sun to hit pawpaw blossoms just right? It means that the sun hits them in a way that showcased the fact that they're purple and turns their often drab purple into a brilliant purple. See below.

Pollinating Pawpaws, and and the First Pawpaw of 2018

For fairly extensive discussion of pollinating pawpaws, see this blog post from a few years ago. For a few pics from this year's work in pollinating the pawpaws, see below. (I took these pics at the end of April, so I'm doing some catch up.)

Linocuts: Pawpaws, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and a Possum

Avid readers of this blog will recall that a few months ago I made a post about a linocut print I made titled "Possum with July Pawpaws, a First Try." In that post I committed to make another version of the print, with a different layering of colors, this one titled "Possum with August Pawpaws, Just Checking." Here's the promised remake.

And here's a great linocut that NJ did, with a yellow-billed cuckoo sitting in a pawpaw tree. The print doesn't imitate Audubon's much more famous painting of a cuckoo in a pawpaw tree, but it's certainly allied with that painting. 

And then here's another linocut, unrelated to pawpaws, made by NJ but I thought it was so good, titled "Desert Raven," that I wanted to include it here.