Sun's Out, Flowers Are Opening

Finally!  A dry sunny day on Saturday.  Actually, quite cold, but warm in the sun. During the past cold rainy week, I have checked on the wildflower progress in the Skidmore Woods several times, but no blooms were budging. Time to go look again.

At first glance, it sure didn't look as if spring had progressed much in these woods. Except for the radiant blue sky, the only colors I saw were brown and gray, a leftover winter scene.

Ah, but look more closely!  The sun's warming rays had coaxed some hepatica buds to open wide.  A nice selection of the colors this pretty native wildflower comes in were lifting their faces to the sky today.

These white-flowered Round-leaved Hepaticas (Hepatica americana) nearly covered the top of a moss-covered boulder.

These radiantly purple blooms had risen amid the forest floor's carpet of dead dry leaves. I love how their deep color fades to white at the edges of the sepals (hepaticas have no petals), giving each bloom a halo effect, as if they were lit from within.

This cluster of pretty pink Sharp-lobed Hepatica blooms (H. acutiloba) was surrounded by a beautiful wreath of wintered-over Morocco-red leaves. Note that these flowers have at least nine sepals.  Hepatica sepals range in number from five up to as many as 12.  The most common number is six.

I could not see the leaves of this next hepatica plant, tucked down beneath a rock as they were and hidden in shadow. But I didn't really search for the leaves, since my gaze was rapt by the sparkling quality of this intensely pinky-purple bloom.

Now that the hepatica rush appears to be here, I wondered what other spring blooms I might find.  The small dangling trumpet-shaped yellow flowers of Leatherwood (Dirca palustris) often bloom at the same time as hepatica, so off I went in search of this native woodland shrub.  And I soon found some shrubs.  The yellowish-gray smooth bark of this low woodland shrub is so distinctive, I can usually pick Leatherwood out from all the other understory shrubs.

Sad to say, over the winter,  deer have stripped many buds from the shrubs, leaving the twigs tipped with shredded remnants.

But many intact buds remained.  At a first search of many shrubs, all I found were still-closed buds, silky with a dense furry down, which no doubt helps to protect the delicate enclosed flowers from spring's capricious freezings.

Aha!  But here was one brave flower cluster,  impatient to break through the confines of those furry bud covers.  Even before the petals emerged, the reproductive parts (the stamens and pistils) had pushed out ahead,  already ripe with pollen, as if eager to get a head start on the season of sexual reproduction.