It started. The procession of trees. The trees don’t move, but the white does: white tree blossoms, from species to species. First, in late February and if not charred by sleet, come white flowers of star magnolia. Stinky Bradford pears are next, trees so ubiquitous in corporate landscapes (and invasive in natural ones) that when they froth white, even people who don’t notice trees notice. Then, dogwood. Everyone loves dogwood. Serviceberry, hawthorn, black cherry, yellowwood, black locust, and so on, week by week of the rolling spring, one white tree bloom after the other. It won’t stop till summer, and by then, who is watching? By then, Nashville is a weedy jungle and we stay inside to escape the chiggers. 

But I’ll be watching. The procession is important. There are rules: only white, only trees, and only where I can see them while I go about my business. I call it the Order of Worship.

The Order of Worship sounds religious because it is, and I may sound religious but I am not. The phrase was suggested by my favorite secular humanist Jew and it hit the right note in my Protestant past—just the right chord of awe, ceremony, and gratitude.  Blossoms are both the object of wonder and the celebrants. 

Order of Worship is just a framework to borrow. Structure keeps me sane when spring is crazy. A frame is an edge, a corner to grasp when the greens slide by too fast. Because spring doesn’t turn on like a switch. It sneaks. How long has the chickweed been blooming in the grass? Was this violet open yesterday? Spring’s first slow teases give hope this year will be different, will be the year I can note every swell, give every bud burst its due, yet still keep my head. And then spring flies. Away. Erupts, more like. And suddenly, I’ve lost my head and footing. I am under green water. My own backyard is foreign. The park trail where every bank was an old friend is a dark, leafy tunnel and not an altogether friendly one. 

But the Order of Worship helps. I can sort one category of miracle into place: white trees and when they bloom. I can compare progression from year to year. I can hold on. 

Last Friday, a few fat, fuzzy buds on the star magnolia split, froze, then rallied during the weekend’s warmth so that today they’ve all burst into frenzies of their own snow. Even last night’s wind only whipped off a few petals. Tomorrow will find more on the pavement, and a hard freeze may burn them, but right now, this moment is the star magnolia’s star turn.

Star magnolias aren’t native trees and therefore do not function deep and wide in our habitat, but they are polite. Educational, too. Low suckers make good show-and-tell on urban nature walks, and buds are big enough for kindergarteners to dissect in the school lot. We poke nestled layers of petal, sniff the sweet lemon meant to lure pollinators. After budburst, flowers are floppy, lank, like used tissue. But when viewed en masse, distributed on leafless twigs and especially on branches pruned for horizontal reach, they make exquisite tableaux. Even a trash alley is a Japanese painting if there’s a full-blown star magnolia at the curb. It is the prelude tree in the Order of Worship.

Let me back up. The general, liturgical concept of “Order of Worship” has existed thousands of years, but I first met it as the stated outline in the bulletins of a childhood church. The progression from prelude to postlude was fixed, ritualized. Signposts included the Apostles’ Creed and Lord’s Prayer, the offering and doxology, scripture, sermon. Mercifully, it also included Mrs. Child’s baked-fresh-that-morning white loaf as Body of Christ. There has never been a tastier Jesus. But whatever the signposts and progression, the structure’s function was to guide pew-bound congregants on a journey to deeper connection with a greater power.

White trees also follow an order. The progression depends upon weather and climate and how biodiverse the viewing range—a few invasive bullies can spoil everything—and it unfolds because it unfolds, not because it is trying to lead us anywhere. Each tree does its own thing in its own time. The only “deeper connection” at work is the connection between a tree’s reproductive bits and a successful pollinator, because to reproduce is a tree’s prime directive. I am far more comfortable with this type of order.

Frankly, the pious overtones of Order of Worship are putting me off right this minute. But what other frame is as useful? I could fabricate an Order of Wonder, but where’s the heft of history, the music of metaphor? 

I could call the whole thing phenology and be done. Phenology is the study of key seasonal changes year to year. I’m interested in all changes, which is why the transition from winter to spring nearly kills me, but my white tree project is just a tiny, arbitrary subset: just one cherry-picked project out of a zillion other observations. And I’m not at the careful data collection stage yet. I’m in a far more subjective phase where I need to see beautiful blooms happen, and happen consecutively: when one tree finishes, another kind starts. I need to know the magic keeps spinning, and along recognized paths. I need to know what to expect and where. 

Let’s get back to what is compelling: trees with spring flowers winter white. We can call the white pure, holy, or at least clean, but no matter the adjective, white is easy to spot in an interstate verge. That’s where I first noticed parts of the Order, driving on I-40, glancing at the unmowable flanks of overpasses and ramps, seeing creamy clouds in the tangle of trash trees. 

The Order goes like this, but timing is fluid: star magnolia, Bradford pear, serviceberry, roughleaf dogwood, flowering dogwood, hawthorns, rusty blackhaw, American plum, black cherry, black locust, yellowwood, oakleaf hydrangea, fringe tree, Southern magnolia, catalpa, persimmon, basswood, sourwood, farkleberry. (Farkleberry is my favorite to say aloud.) The Order fattens or lengthens as I find new trees. Last year, I had no idea my kid’s school had three serviceberries behind the teachers’ parking lot. The year before that, we found a yellowwood on a walk we’d taken hundreds of times. 

The Order is diverse. Some are native, some not; some are “desirable” landscape material, some not. Some are familiar specimen trees; some are tucked on hillsides off-trail in the woods. Some you don’t notice till tiny flowers fall at your feet, some are in-your-face obvious, and some are smelled before seen. 

Bradford pear blooms stink like dirty socks (and worse)—but black locust blooms are heaven. The first spring at our first grown-up house, I staggered through the backyard, face lifted, trying to breathe my way toward the source of something new: not honeysuckle vine, not star jasmine, but along those lines, and definitely with a hint of the Hawaiian White Ginger Splash I bought from an Avon lady when I was twelve. Perfume ghosted every breeze and was especially haunting at twilight. Black locust, as I later knew it to be, is sweet but deep, resonant: one of those creamy, heady florals no adjective can satisfy and that makes me want to press fistfuls of blooms to my face and swoon. I’d wake improved, somehow, and with no chiggers despite full body contact with lawn. 

From inside a moving car on the interstate, black locust flowers are seen and not smelled. But if you walk your dog atop an overpass, you might get both. And if you know about the hole in the fence where the homeless guy, the stoner kids, and the coyotes have worn a packed path, you can stand below trees and pluck spent blooms from the grass. Most will be small bouquets nipped by squirrels, still sturdy enough to stand in a juice glass to perfume the house a few more days. Each tiny flower is papilionaceous, butterfly-shaped and exquisite, as per other members of the bean family (like sweetpeas, redbud), and wet with nectar to call butterflies, ants, and bees. Black locust honey, or acacia honey, is said to be divine. 

Bees lead me to another possible frame for the order of white. Beekeepers record the dates of nectar and pollen sources within a foraging area, and I’ve read this can be called a Floral Calendar. Or the less poetic “Floral Inventory.” My so-called Order of Worship is a calendar and inventory too, but of my own foraging zone, restricted to color, to trees, and to my own fancies. When I ask my local bee friend about the Floral Calendar, she says that in real life beekeepers simply talk to each other about “what’s blooming now.” No need for metaphoric framework. How practical. My version could likewise be “what white tree is blooming now.” 

I still vote for Order of Worship as most useful term. It wins despite the implied religiosity and because of it. Because this is the cultic language I reach for to describe the higher power that is a flower. As long as I don’t get too literal assigning liturgical signposts to tree species, I can deal. My exception is for the prelude, because you have to start somewhere.

You have to finish somewhere, too. At the bottom of every mimeographed church bulletin was the phrase, “Worship ends, Service begins,” which made no sense. Was it a recurring typo? Hadn’t we just survived the service, which was now, at last ending, not beginning? Later, I understood service could be verb as well as noun. The phrase implied we had worshiped together, and we were now expected to go out and serve. Fine, but how do I serve my trees?  

By trying to see them, learn about them, write about them. I’m afraid I’ll come off as evangelical (heaven forbid), but I should invite others to see. I should invite you to find your phenological order wherever your foraging range may be: whether it’s a park or a parking lot, a driveway, a city block or the interstate median. To look around at “what’s blooming now.”

Our service is to deepen our connection to the place around us, and to our place in it. This is greater power enough. And it can start with one bud on one tree, no matter the color.