Wildflowers B-r-r-r-ave the Return of Wintry Weather

Spring sure had us fooled for a while.  First, we had hardly any winter, and then it turned real warm real early.  Flowers started to open, tree buds started to swell, scarves and mittens and longjohns moved to the back of the bureau.  Then WHAM!  Snow fell!  The temperature dived!  And not just for a day or two.  Wintry weather has lasted most of a week, and it was still cold this Friday, even spitting a little snow now and then, when I ventured out to the Skidmore Woods to see how the first brave flowers had managed to cope with this wintry weather's return.  Or maybe they hadn't.

For sure, Hepaticas know how to cope.  They have these furry bracts they can pull their opening blooms back into.  And so they had.

The green rockets of False Hellebore had pushed on up, despite the cold, but they looked as if the frost had wilted some of those leaves.

The English Violets, too, looked rather the worse for the weather, their deep-purple petals marred with many white spots of freezing damage.  But they still smelled every bit as delicious as ever!

And for some of our sturdier flowers, the wintery cold has not dissuaded them at all from making their regular early April appearance.  These Giant Blue Cohosh were already up, complete with flower buds that seemed right on the verge of blooming.

No flower buds yet on the Trout Lilies, though, but lots of their speckled leaves were carpeting the forest floor.

I was really surprised to find these Leatherwood buds already dangling their yellow trumpets, since just a week ago those buds hadn't even yet begun to swell.  But the flowers did look a little bit crumpled, as if they had suffered some from freezing.  Our temperatures did drop into the teens for a couple of nights.

Actually, I was really grateful to find any Leatherwood flowers at all, since deer had once again browsed most of the Leatherwood shrubs, chewing off almost all of the flowering tips.