It snowed which didn’t do somethings any good at all.  Actually, it was more the very welcome inch and a half of rain that melted the last few crocus and snowdrops and smashed the chionodoxa under the river birch to bits.  I hope that the latter recover a bit and establish themselves, it would be nice to have a pool of bright blue by the drive there.

I suspect by the time it warms up tomorrow, that the meadow will complete its transformation from brown to green.

Elsewhere, the daffodils, scilla (squill), pushkinia*, tulips, hyacinth, and others are all coming along.  Spring bulbs are an international gathering: Siberia, Central Asia, the Black Sea, Spain, Wales, Scotland, England…  Following close behind are the spring ephemerals, the natives of the rich woodlands of the Americas.

Time to plays into it, hyacinths once flourished here in the 1870’s.  No trace of those are left, but they made the local newspaper then.  Maybe someday the hyacinths by the pond will be re-established.  But scilla grew for my grandmother here and the same bulbs still spring up a bright, saturated blue, the Van Sion daffodils were collected by my father at a site that was being bulldozed, the King Alfreds on the bank came out of the woods and surprised us all, the odd mixed daffodils from a school garden planted by my mother.

How can a flower, so fragile, be a link of space, of time, of memory? Is it not a miracle in our everyday lives?

 

*Similar to the scillas, a delicately striped blue and white, eye catching and unusual. Tough as nails.  For John, it is near Merlin, with love.