This past Sunday I was in Tompkins Square Park trying to finalize the tree and lamp post positions on my map of the park. The Red Admiral butterflies migrating through the city at the moment seemed attracted to the colors. I took that as a good sign.
My Tompkins Square Park Tree Identification Project is steadily progressing, though the process is slow as I alone am the project. My latest work in getting the map right is to print out the latest version and take it out to the park to verify that it makes sense from various locations. That is, sitting on benches in this lovely spring weather and drawing corrections on the map until it does makes sense.

Though I haven’t put much up on the blog, I’ve been taking terabytes of photos of the trees this Spring, gathering panoramas around the park as well as grabbing details of the buds, flowers and leaves as they appear on individual trees. Keeping track of what is flowering when, has really helped in my quest to identify all the trees in the park, but you should understand that I was coming from almost total ignorance in tree identification when I started this project last Summer. So at the moment I’m more confident of where the trees are than what species they are. I will probably have a version of the map that I’m willing to put online soon.