A late-autumn scene in Mount Lebanon: a babbling brook and thousands of yellow leaves from sugar maples.

The Gathering Storm from Father Pitt on Vimeo.

Yesterday’s storm clouds as they gathered over Mount Lebanon. This video has no sound, and nothing happens in it except clouds moving. If, like old Pa Pitt, you find clouds fascinating, you might like it. The rest of you will be completely bored for just three seconds shy of a minute.

Storm clouds are moving across the area, bringing welcome relief from the heat, but also lightning, strong winds, and power outages.

A Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) visits the flowers of a Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii) in Beechview. If you like butterflies, a butterfly garden is easy to put together and beautiful in its own right. The Butterfly Bush is a good start; milkweeds (Asclepias spp.) and coneflowers (Echinacea spp.) will also bring crowds of butterflies.

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A moment of serenity by a babbling brook in Fox Chapel, swollen with spring rains.

A stream tumbles down into a hollow in the woods in Fox Chapel. Spring rains have swollen all the streams and made delightful waterfalls everywhere,

…and that, of course, means new flowers appearing over at Flora Pittsburghensis,  such as this tiny but cheerful Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta).

Hail the size of commercial ice cubes came down on parts of Pittsburgh this afternoon. (Hail of this size is most commonly compared to golf balls, but old Pa Pitt is not a golfer.) More than an hour and a half after it fell, this hailstone and many others were still sitting on the grass mocking the 50-degree weather.

Hamamelis vernalis is a species of witch hazel whose native range is restricted to the Ozark Plateau. It will grow quite happily in Pittsburgh, however, and is well worth seeking out. The first warm winter day, from about Christmas on, will bring out these intriguing little flowers all over the bush. They’re not all that much to look at, although they make a beautiful ikebana-style bouquet in a vase. But the scent is sweet and very strong; a few twigs can scent a whole house. When the weather turns cold again, the flowers fold up, ready to show themselves once more on the next warm day. Meanwhile, if you cut a twig and bring it in at any time during the winter, it will unfurl its little flowers and get to work pumping out perfume.