Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year

After several above-freezing days that also brought lots of snow-melting rain, I thought that yesterday, with its balmy temps and bright-blue sky, would be a good day to go look for our first flower of spring. And I knew that the Spring Run Trail in Saratoga would be a good place to find it, for lots of Skunk Cabbage thrives in the swampy spots that line this inner-city trail.  Another appealing point about this  trail is that it is regularly plowed, so walking it should have been easy. Or so I thought.

Yes, there were indeed patches of pavement along the trail that were perfectly clear of ice and snow, but the stretch I meant to follow to reach the most likely Skunk Cabbage patch was coated with water-slicked ice.  Expecting a cleared path, I'd neglected to pull my ice grippers over my boots, so the going was slow, either schlumping through shin-deep snow in the ditches, or slithering flat-footed and carefully, carefully, slowly, slowly along the ice.

And after all that, the reward was meager.  In the place where I usually find dozens of swelling Skunk Cabbage spathes this time of year, I found only two visible plants.  Except for these two examples, both of which were growing directly in flowing water, all others were still hiding beneath many inches of not-yet-melted snow.

While the swelling bulbous spathes of both plants had acquired their bright spring colors of mottled red and yellow, the spathes were still closed tight.  When the pollen-bearing flowers within the spathes are actually blooming, the spathes will open wide to waft the flowers' distinctive fly-enticing scent on the air and invite the earliest pollinating insects in.  I think it will be a while yet before we'll be seeing (or smelling!) these first flowers of spring.

Especially now that winter had returned, and for who knows how long?  It sure looks more wintry than spring-like outside my door today!