suns along the Mohawk

St. George‘s celebrated the Feast Day of its namesake patron saint, George the Martyr, yesterday (April 23) with a Patronal Festival that included a traditional Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans ceremony.

The Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans 

“Kirk” is a Scottish word meaning church as a noun and “bring to church” as a verb.  According to The Capitol Scot [Washington, D.C.] website, in an essay called Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans Ceremony, “Clan representatives carry lengths (or flags) of tartans forward to the altar rail and the Chaplain says a few words about the Scottish heritage and gives a blessing.”  According to the Scottish Tartan Museum, having annual Kirkin’ ceremonies is apparently a wholly American-Scottish tradition that started in New York City in the early 1940s. But the rite harkens back to the days of the Act of Proscription, when wearing a kilt was banned, and Highlanders would hide pieces of tartan and bring them to church for a secret blessing.

  When the procession started, I was at the wrong end of N. Ferry St., at the Indian, so quite a few of my initial photos feature the backs and backsides of the marchers.  Eventually, I got a bit closer and got some faces.   I hope you enjoy the slideshow of a Stockade and Scottish tradition that added some color to a gray-cloud morning.

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– Symon gets a shiny new Ride: a $43,000 GMC Acadia Denali crossover vehicle –

General Motors’ truck-SUV division GMC sent a film crew to the Stockade early on May 3, 2011.  Thanks to a posting at Don Rittner’s Times Union weblog titled “What do The Onrust Project and General Motors Corporation have in Common?” (May 11, 2011), I’ve learned more details to share, along with a few photos I took on May 3rd.

Shooting on Front St. at N. Church, the film crew was making a short documentary about the replica ship Onrust as part of a Community Projects program that will feature GMC vehicles in five “real-life community service projects” for their 2012 catalog and retailing efforts.   Don is rightly proud of the Onrust project’s selection for the program, and his posting has the story, plus lots of links to relevant GMC materials.  You can also read about the program at GMC Community Projects page on Facebook.

In a press release, GMC explains:

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– mulched and ready for action – 11 A.M. –

– mulch mound – 9 A.M. –

– mulch mound – 10:45 A.M. –

  The Stockade’s annual Clean-up & Planting Day in Riverside Park morphed into a single-focused project this year:  laying down a thick carpet of mulch beneath every piece of equipment in the Park’s children’s playground as protective ground-cover.  After a campaign by Stockade resident Tom Hodgkins to make the playground safer, the Stockade Association decided to purchase a mountain of mulch from the County, which was delivered to the end of North Street on Friday, May 13, 2011.

In the slideshow below, you can see about 30 photos depicting many aspects of this morning’s mulching project — from the giant, intimidating mulch mound at 9 AM, to the arrival of members of the Union College crew team and SCCC athletic program, plus many neighbors with rakes, shovels, gloves and wheelbarrels, and the amazing disappearing mound (10:45 AM), to relaxing college kids after their hard labors, Hodgkins’ kids working and charming us all (as usual), and consumption of pizza to cap the event. As always, Jennifer Wells and Carol DeLaMater worked extra hard, along with Tom Hodgkins, to organize the project and keep things rolling.  The college students were indispensable, as were several of our neighbors.  Thanks to all those who helped and to the Stockade Association for funding and feeding the event.

The Gallery at the  bottom of this posting has each of the   photos from the Slideshow. Click on the image for a larger version.

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Click here for our posting about the 2010  spring clean-up and planting day in Riverside Park.

 For a bonus dose of the event’s three extra-cute children, see “Clifford and the Hodgkins Kids.”

. Click on an image in the Gallery below for a larger version of the photo.

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   If you can get them to slow down a litle and look at the camera, it’s almost impossible to take a bad shot of the three children of Tom and Weiwei Hodgkins.  As a large pile of mulch was spread today under the playground equipment at Riverside Park, brothers Tianning and Hainuo worked and played hard all morning, and little sister Xiwen (“Concetta”) observed serenely and charmed the crowd.

They star in the following slideshow along with Clifford the Big Red Dog.  Hainuo sees his big brother on Clifford and decides to join him.  I did a lot of smiling.

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– You can see more of the Hodgkins kids and our coverage of the big mulch project in our next posting, “Riverside playground mulched for safety.”  –

.  . from April 27 to May 3rd .  .

– It’s only been a week, but our 2011 Stockade cherry blossoms are already almost gone. –

   This season’s blossoms lived up to their symbolic message about beauty and impermanence.  They may, however, soon be memorialized on the masthead of the Stockade Association website — as part of a series of photographs in rotation.  Until then, here are screen-shot samples of images of our 2011 blossoms along Washington Avenue, sized in the challenging 8.5 to 1 aspect ratio of the Association masthead. You can click on either sampler for a larger version.

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Naturally, the suns along the Mohawk archives will always contain the photographs posted here over the past week of our blooming Stockade neighborhood.  Start here.

  Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, April 30), I noticed for the very first time that the tall thin tree behind Lawrence the Indian had lovely, white flowering blossoms in the Spring.  I asked a few of the most peripatetic of my Stockade neighbors, and none could recall seeing the white blossoms before.  Naturally, the sight needed to be captured digitally.

– click on the photo above for a larger version –

In the Slideshow below, you’ll see that the amount and angle of sunlight can make a significant difference, in photos taken at 6 PM on Saturday and at 7 AM and 3 PM today, Sunday, May 1, 2011.   The always-informative Sylvie Briber suggested the tree looked like a Bradford Pear tree, and my original research seemed to confirm that fact. [But, see below — it is apparently a Redspire pear tree.]

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If your powers of observation are better than mine, and you can give us information about Lawrence’s pear tree, please leave a comment or send me an email.

follow-up (June 10, 2011): It’s a Redspire pear tree. In a Comment submitted today (see below), Stan Hickok wrote that he is a ReTree Schenectady volunteer and, working closely with Susanna Sherwood and the Garden Club, initiated a ReTree program to replace Stockade trees.   Stan informs us that the tree featured in this posting was planted in 2001 and is in fact not a Bradford pear, but a Redspire pear tree.  Like the Bradford, it is in the callery family of pear trees.  See my reply to Stan for more information about the Redspire, which some observers say has many of the same problems as the Bradford.  For example, see “Callery Pears Can Cause Problems” (University of Illinois Extension, Feb. 23, 2005).

p.s.  Despite its beautiful Spring blossoms and spectacular Fall colors, I was surprised to discover that the Bradford Pear tree  (which does not bear fruit) has many detractors. as one critic at the Alabama Coop Extension explains:

For despite all the beauty they lend to thousands of landscapes throughout the region, the trees are plagued with one fatal flaw: due to their combination of vigorous growth, weak wood and poor branch structure, they often begin falling apart after only 20 years.

Another expert estimates that the trees only have an average lifespan of 15 years, and noted that they are especially susceptible to ice and snow damage.  For a detailed article, read, “Bradford Pear Tree (To plant or not to plant),” by Deb Magnes at the Dave’s Garden website.

  Magnolia blossoms make a fine complement to blooming forsythia (or vice versa).  Below, after a slideshow of photos taken today in the Stockade, you will find a gallery that includes each photo; click on each photo in the Gallery for a larger version, and scroll over it for a description.

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The Gallery below includes each of the slideshow photos (click on each photo for a larger version).

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