A Virtual Walk Into Spring

Ah, here it is at last: the first day of March!  Yes, I know, winter's not officially over yet, snow still lies thick on the ground around here, but the sun is bright today and the temps are mild, and I would love to go out for a walk in the woods.  But I'm still too sick from a bout of pneumonia to walk much further than from the couch to the bathroom to hack up chest phlegm.  So instead, I took a walk through my old blog posts, feasting my eyes on those photos that reassure me that spring will indeed be here soon.

It's even possible that Skunk Cabbage is already melting the snow around its Morocco-red spathes and offering its pollen-laden spadices to early pollinators.

It soon will be time to rummage through Hazelnut twigs, hoping to discover the bright-ruby female flowers hiding among them, so tiny as to be almost invisible to anyone but the most persistent seeker. But this flower doesn't need to lure pollinators with showy blooms, since abundant male catkins are wafting their powder-fine pollen toward them from neighboring shrubs.

Next to come will be the striking sunbursts of Coltsfoot, the first flower of spring that actually looks like a flower -- the kind we would draw as kids with a bright-yellow crayon.  Not a native wildflower, but the bees and other bugs are sure happy to find its abundant pollen while our native floral offerings remain exceedingly scarce. And it often grows abundantly in nutrient-poor "waste places" where few other flowers would thrive.

Soon to follow are the wildflowers of the forest floor, the ones that need to bloom and set seed before the tree canopy closes over and gobbles all the sunshine for itself.  Leading this parade of beauties are two species of Hepatica, sharp-lobed and round-lobed, in all their lovely shades of purple and pink and sparkling white.

At about the same time, wetlands and roadside ditches will be exploding with gold, as the stunningly generous Marsh Marigolds burst into bloom.  Many of our other spring wildflowers are rather shy and retiring, needing to be diligently sought if we want to enjoy their beauty.  Not so for this gorgeous bloomer, so showy it's hard to believe it could be a wildflower.

An equally generous bloomer in its woodland habitat is the far more demure Spring Beauty, with its candy-striped flowers crowned with baby-pink anthers. When this lovely wildflower finds a habitat it likes, it sure doesn't hold back, but often decorates the forest floor as far as the eye can see.

No flower signals Spring more beautifully than Bloodroot, with its haloes of pure-white petals circling sunbursts of golden anthers.  Sadly, we have only a small window of opportunity to marvel at the gorgeousness of this native wildflower, since it seems it has only opened its petals before they begin to fall.  Luckily, they often bloom in such abundance along roadsides that we know when they have arrived and we can feast our eyes on their beauty without having to run to the woods.

This is just a small sampling of all the floral joys to come in the marvelous months of spring.  As I look forward to our re-encounters not that many weeks away,  I feel better already, resolved to rest up for the woodland walks that await.


While enjoying this virtual wildflower walk through old blog posts, I happened upon this photo of Scotch Pine bark, and I thought it was so stunning I wanted to share it again.  I know that most lumbermen hate Scotch Pine for its useless timber, and botanists disdain it for its alien status. But oh my, isn't this lovely? If we put a frame around this section of bark, we could hang it in a museum and call it abstract art.