Hope Springs! Flowers Bloom!

What a Monday it was!  Sunny and warm, with temps approaching 70 degrees!  An unbelievably spring-like day for so early in March.  Sadly, my lungs are still too compromised by this recent illness to allow me to venture out to the woods to note what transformations must be occurring.  I fear that this year I will miss opening day for our very first flower of spring, the Skunk Cabbage. But then I remembered an even earlier bloomer I found in full flower on this date last year, the Winter Aconite (Eranthis hyemalis).  And even better, I found it blooming right by the road near the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton.  I could drive right up to it!

And so I did.

And there it was: bright sunny flowers in multitudinous bloom, scattered across the dead brown leaves of the forest floor.  And all I had to do to enjoy it was stand by the side of the road.

Yeah, I know, for a native-plant snob like me, this flower shouldn't even count, since this Buttercup-family flower is an introduced alien species, native to the Mediterranean regions of Europe but not to North America.  Gardeners grow it here, of course, and why wouldn't they?  Who wouldn't want to step out their door and be greeted by these sunshine-bright blooms, even while snow still lies deep in the shaded areas of the garden?

I myself was certainly glad to see it, even though it was not in my own garden.  There is evidence here, though, that this patch of Winter Aconite was once part of SOMEbody's garden long ago, since these blooms were surrounded by a crumbling stone wall with moss-covered steps leading down the roadside bank.

When I ventured down these crumbling stone steps to photograph the Aconite, I discovered a second early-blooming garden flower called Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), only these were still in bud, having just pushed their way up through the crusted snow in a more shaded area of this plot.  Again, this is not a North American native wildflower, but it is frequently planted in gardens here, where it obviously survives some of the coldest winters in the country.

Meanwhile, our native early-blooming wildflowers are still tucked in under the snow that remains  shin-deep throughout the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve.  I hope they will wait to bloom until I am well enough to greet them when they open their faces to the spring.