Until recently, I never thought much about shade trees producing flowers.
But they do!!!

About six weeks ago, I photographed the flowers on one of our Sugar Maple trees: http://www.pbase.com/britestar/image/167198424
That tree flowered before any leaves were seen.

The Norway Maple, however, has both leaves and tiny flowers together. If you're not looking for them, the flowers aren't significantly noticeable. For that reason, I would like liked to have gotten a close up macro of the flowers. Unfortunately, today's weather was not co-operative for such an endeavor. It was quite overcast (which made the colors pop) & also had 20 MPG sustained winds and gusts up to 45 MPH. With those winds (and an older camera body), a true macro was out of the question.

Frankly, with the wind, I was happy to get any photos at all. The wind was so strong that it was "snowing" crab apple blossoms. For that reason, I expect the Crab Apple trees to soon be bare of flowers.

More wind - with rain and possibly severe storms - is predicted for the next 3 days. That's why I decided to try today for some shots of the newly spotted Norway Maple flowers. These yellow flowers may not still be on the tree by the end of the week. I feel that if you don't at least try, you don't get anything. So I tried. 50% of my dozen photos were as good as this one. The other 50% were totally OOF because a 45 MPH wind gust hit the tree just as I pushed the shutter button.