Spring 2020 is coming!

As the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted virtually every aspect of life here in Korea and around the world, my annual "first blossoms of spring" post serves this year particularly to remind us that, in the larger sense, life goes on. Korean public schools have been postponed for a total of five weeks so far, baseball and soccer seasons will have a late start, the Tokyo Olympics will be rescheduled, but the flowers are blooming on their regular schedule. Gotta love Nature!

As the first photo shows, with the Magnolia campbellii in the foreground, spring has even managed to spruce up my school frontage with a nice splash of color.


On the other corner of the main building at school is a purple variety:


But the first flowering harbinger of spring is always the "kenari", the Golden Bell, scientifically Forsythia koreana, which is the bush that lines both sides of Airport Highway along my walk to school.


Another of our first bloomers on the peninsula is the azalea, member of the rhododendron family:


My recently downloaded plant recognition app (PlantSnap), which is really really cool--take a picture, inside or outside the app, and it does a pretty good job telling what plant you're looking at--insists this is Prunus cerasus, or sour cherry, but I think it's the "Chinese apricot"--maehwa in Korean.


And finally, right next to the school, is this fabulous entry, that I think actually is sour cherry:


Caveat, I am not a botanist, I am just a middle aged guy who likes flowers. Regular visitors to my Seoul patch surely know this, but if you didn't click on "flowers" in the label cloud for 41 other posts that have lots of pics of, um, flowers. From Korea, and from my travels around Asia since I came here in 2008.