Brooks Payne biked over to Forest Hills Cemetery the other day.

Thebostonlol spotted this early fall display on a manhole cover in Roxbury yesterday.

The EEI means the cover was originally installed by the Edison Electric and Illuminating Co., a forerunner to today's Eversource, and the one-time owner of a radio station with the call letters WEEI - one of the oldest stations in the country.

WBUR reports that a spruce tree at the Arnold Arboretum has produced a rare batch of half male, half female cones this spring.

Trees along VFW Parkway on either side of South Street at the West Roxbury/Brookline line are currently wrapped in protective wooden slats as a contractor hired by DCR gets ready to revamp the intersection with new left-turn lanes on the parkway and traffic signals. Read more.

Last November, somebody noticed a problem with the "elbow tree," a distinctive birch tree near the Jamaica Pond boathouse with a prominent limb pointing downward at the water, rather than up - its trunk had begun to split open. That's a sign of impending death and the person attached a couple of small notebooks and a pencil to the tree both so that people could measure the crack as it spread and to say goodbye to the longtime pondside attraction. Read more.

Residents along the Arborway and the parkway part of Centre Street in Jamaica Plain have long had to watch the aftermath of motorists taking out street-light poles. One reports on the latest carnage this weekend, to go with the photos she took. Read more.

Claudia Pouravelis reports what happened on Waltham Street in the South End around 6 p.m.

Scariest sound of my life. Crash outside 6pm playground full of children. Huge tree just fell over on Waltham in South End for no apparent reason. Cars damaged but no one hurt - thank God.

The East Boston Times-Free Press reports on a volunteer effort to plant 100 trees in East Boston this spring as part of an effort to increase the neighborhood's tree count closer to that in Boston's leafier neighborhoods.