Looking down at the ground, I noticed birch leaves,
and tasted a twig to confirm that it was a black birch (also known as sweet birch - click to see previous post on this species).
The fruiting catkins are mature; they're densely packed with papery seeds.
New female catkins will emerge in the spring out of the pointed buds. Male flower buds (in the upper left corner) are long, scaly, and rounded at the tip. In the spring, they will grow into yellow male catkins.
The persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) is native to the Southeastern United States. It's in the Ebony family and true to its family name, it has very dark (and very hard) wood. Persimmon wood has been used in golf clubs, bowling pins, and billiard cues.
The mature bark is distinctive; it's cracked into square plates.
But the most distinctive feature of the persimmon is the fruit. It looks like a small orange tomato with a large persistent calyx. The fruit is edible, but if eaten before ripe, can taste uncomfortably chalky. Usually it's ready to eat after a frost. 
Now's the time for bulb planting. 
Daffodils will bloom around the Pierrepont monument in early spring. Other monuments around the cemetery are being bulbed as well, either by family request,
or because monuments with built-in beds simply demand flowers.
Fossils indicate that the Ginkgo family is over 200 million years old. Ginkgo biloba is the only species living today in the entire division Ginkgophyta. 
Ginkgoes are dioecious, meaning some trees are male and some are female. This particular group of trees is the product of asexual reproduction. An older gingko was cut down and new shoots came up around the stump. 
As the stump decayed, the strongest shoots survived and grew into trees, forming a ring of ginkgoes.
-looking up from the center-
-cicada shell on ginkgo bark-
The leaves are set in whorls on short, slow-growing shoots.
They're green in the summer...
and turn yellow in the fall.
If you've ever walked by a female ginkgo around this time of year, you know why most cities only allow male ginkgoes to be planted along the streets: the fruit smells pretty bad. Some say rancid butter, but I didn't even know butter could go bad, so consulting my personal odor library, I can only say that it's reminiscent of stomach acid mixed with partially digested food.
This path was covered in fallen leaves and fruit.
a treacherous route...
This kousa was glowing a couple days ago. I recently went back and all of the leaves had been dropped. Things are changing so quickly these days...
A mature kousa can be recognized at any time of year by the bark. It exfoliates in small round pieces,
...creating a multi-colored trunk.
The Japanese maples are having their fall moment right now. This tree had leaves of all colors from green to red.
This one near the catacombs had some nice reds and oranges.
A weeping cherry is supposed to only weep, but this tree has a split personality.
The bottom of the tree is skirted with pendulous branches.
But the top of the tree has no signs of weeping at all. And looking up into the canopy, all you see are branches reaching for the sky.
A weeping cherry is often made by grafting: a non-weeping variety is left to grow until the trunk is about four or five feet tall, at which point the branches are cut off and the weeping cherry is grafted on. The original tree can still throw up branches from below the graft, and if these aren't cut off at the base, they can end up dominating the tree.
That's what has happened here. Both types of branches are different varieties; they might even flower at different times. The only way to make a uniform tree at this point would be to cut off all of the weeping branches.
Beeches are easy to fall in love with.
The canopies are full and round, with purple --almost black-- leaves where constantly exposed to the sun,
but the trunks are their main draw. 
Something about them evokes elephant legs: the authority with which they grip the ground, 
the way the bark wrinkles and folds,
their unreserved size... 
Vista Avenue is lined with beeches, so tree (and pachyderm) lovers visiting Green-Wood should be sure to take this route. (The weeping beeches on Larch are also a sight).
The flattened sprays of scale-like leaves make Thuja occidentalis easily recognizable. These immature cones will open up and brown as they ripen.
Arborvitae (meaning "tree of life") gets its common name from the medicinal properties of the bark and twigs. It's also called Northern white cedar.
This arborvitae has outgrown (or has been trained out of) the typically conical shape.
Heavy winds or loose soil might have caused this specimen to fall over.
Now each branch is like a mini-tree. Or, as a friends says, it's a single-tree forest of arborvitae.
The tree on the right is a dwarf Alberta spruce. It's a popular landscape planting because it grows slowly and retains its conical shape without any pruning. The tree on the left is also a dwarf Alberta spruce, but it's sporting.
The dwarf Alberta spruce, discovered in 1904 near Lake Laggan in Alberta, Canada, is cultivar of white spruce, Picea glauca. Cultivars are prone to bud sporting, a phenomenon in which a branch reverts, or mutates back, to the original species. This bud sport, if left to grow, will dominate the dwarf Alberta spruce, as white spruce grows much faster.
White spruce has thicker needles with a slight bluish tinge. 
Dwarf Alberta spruce rarely fruits, but the white spruce sport has lots of cones.
