Spring beauty

I've been so bad at keeping up with this blog and good grief, although today is April 21, outdoors it is already midsummer. Everything that was supposed to bloom in the spring bloomed and everything that was supposed to bloom a month from now.....bloomed (Roses! I have roses the first week of April!). There's a lot going on out there but I want to capture the beauty of what was blooming a couple Sundays ago before I venture out to Kansas again tomorrow.

The Dwarf Crested iris (Iris cristata) I planted last year along the stream bank was blooming. I only got one bloom but the rest of the plants are looking good so hopefully next year they will be spectacular.

The non-native irises were blooming too and of course, they were spectacular (irises always are). I remember the very first iris I met. My best friend in high school's mother was a gardener and I remember walking out the back door of their house one spring and seeing her mother's irises in bloom. They were the most exotic thing I had ever seen...regal, sturdy, delicate, upright and tall...irises just have a special presence to them. Although I did have a big collection of houseplants as a teenager (dozens), I hadn't realized until now that I had an equal interest in the plants growing natively outdoors too. I remember talking about trilliums with my friend's mother, a plant she coveted. I had seen trilliums growing in Northern Michigan and promised to dig her up some if I ever found them again. That was a lonnnnnnnnnng time ago but every spring when I see my first irises in bloom, I think of Mrs. Maki. :-)

Last year I had planted some Heart-leaf Golden Alexanders (Zizia aptera) in an area I had cleared in the woods...

...but this year, you can hardly see them because of all the mayapples that took over this newly cleared area (I was trying to get rid of the coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus)... a native plant that is absolutely everywhere. Everywhere. It's in the honeysuckle family...you can tell it's a relative because it makes its presence known absolutely everywhere. Everywhere! Coralberry is a woodlands plant and is probably of some use to deer if they are starving but in my 15 acres of woods, nobody seems that interested in it.....especially me. Okay, end of rant.).

Mayapples. Mayapples. Mayapples. They were coming up everywhere...this one was popping through an old oak leaf.

I remember when I saw my first small colony of mayapples when I first bought my land and was so happy to find that 10 square feet of native prettiness. Hahaha. Those mayapples are just everywhere this year. To the horizon line. Mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) are spring ephemerals so in a couple months they will be gone...I sure wish that boring coralberry/buckbrush was an ephemeral. Too bad it's an "everpresent."

Violet Wood Sorrel (Oxalis violacea) was blooming right on the path. I had never seen it before.

You can tell it's in the oxalis family because of the shamrock leaves.

This has been a spectacular year for Spring Beauties (Claytonia virginica). I usually find them lost in the growing grass but they were as elusive as mayapples this year. :-)

They were blooming in every little cranny in the woods, as well as in the areas that get a lot of sunlight.

The oak leaves were beginning to unfurl.

Feathery prettiness even before they let go...

I walked past a little 4 foot tree in the woods that looked like yellow-green Christmas bulbs were hanging from it.

That little oak tree had five huge oak galls on it. Five. It was something (here Tilly helps with the photography by moving in to provide some extra contrast).

This year the hickory leaves are unfurling when they feel like it. I remember them synchronizing their ballet a few years ago so that it seemed like all the unfurling took place in just one day. I've been watching these guys unfurl for a couple weeks now. It's random this year for some reason.

Still, it was a day full of spring beauty...but this guy wouldn't know it. He had his head stuck in a hole in the dirt.
I pulled him out to get a look at him to see if we had met before.

Nope. New box turtle to me. He was unimpressed with me and everything around him...nothing new there when it comes to turtles.

I sure would hate to have to perform in front of an audience of turtles because whatever you do to entertain them, nothing will impress them. Nothing.

I put him back in his napping spot. So much concentrated spring beauty around him but since he's a turtle, it's all a big whatever to him.


But of course, not to me. :-)

If the Spring Beauties are blooming...

...I guess it must be spring.

That was my thought almost a month ago because I was still having my doubts about this spring business. Little bits and pieces of color were starting to accent the brown landscape but it was not enough for me. The sky didn't even have any color. It had been consistently overcast ranging from an even white to a lumpy grey for weeks and it was decidedly oppressive. I wanted to see color, somewhere, and a lot of it.

At least I could get what I craved in closeup shots...

The crazy purple blue of these grape hyacinths was not as elusive as the blue in the sky however. Almost a month later, they are still a crazy purple.

This has been one odd spring. I had to go searching for crocuses this year. The only ones I saw were the few blooms in my own yard until the squirrels stomped on them. Daffodils this year? I saw some.

The magnolias and dogwoods have been spectacular but I had to check under the leaves of my crabapples to see if they had bloomed...and they had, secretly.

In Kansas, the Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) were doing a good job of blooming (in the woods) but not so much where I found them blooming in big colonies last year.

Every year is always so different from the year before. Some things are going to grow, and some will not. And I'm not sure if I have any input on that. Doesn't matter how much I study up on things to make sure each plant goes where it should be happiest, it still doesn't guarantee that plants will do what they're supposed to do. And then there are always the unplanned and unexpected things that happen. The three Golden Alexanders (Zizia aptera) I planted last year? They all came up....but one disappeared a couple weeks ago when some varmint decided that that very spot was the perfect spot to choose as his front door to wherever he had to go (that plant just disappeared and all that was left was some tunneled hole). Another Zizia now has a hosta actively pushing it out of the way as it is growing up under it. Where the heck did that hosta come from? I know it must have been planted there some time in the past but I had never seen any hosta remnants there before. Errrgh. That Zizia is a goner...probably the hosta too when a deer discovers it. But as of yesterday, I still have one Zizia left. That's something (I guess). So much for "the" perfect spot.

There were new things to see this year though. This was the year I saw my first gooseberry blossom (Ribes missouriense)...

I was delighted for a couple weeks and then realized, when the flowers were gone and the gooseberries had leafed out, that those gooseberries were those annoying scruffy shrubs in the woods that get in my way.

Little Solomon's Seals (Polygonatum biflorum) were popping up solo in all sorts of areas, just one, never two.

I think this flower is a wild plum. I love how those white stamens keep the exuberant golden yellow anthers tethered so they can't make an airborne escape.

For some reason, I missed seeing those flowers last year too.

But there's one flower you can always depend on seeing every spring, those darn dandelions...which apparently can grow in water....

or not (that's not a clump I tossed on the rock, that dandelion is growing in the rock!).

A couple mornings ago, I found another surprise plant, but this time it was in my backyard in Missouri. It's a plant I often see on my walks in the woods in Kansas-Persicaria virginianum (or Tovara virginiana or Polygonum virginianum, plants in the polygonum family get renamed a lot). Last fall I must have carried some seeds back...or part of the plant back on my shoes after returning from Kansas. I'm not sure why I go through all this fuss about planting things correctly when some plants can sneak in the car with you and go out in your backyard and plant themselves and do just fine.

Crazy little plant. I'm kind of curious to see how this country plant will do in the city.

Spring sniffing

Two Sundays ago I caught a cold. Violet and I snored in each other's faces all day and at times would wake up to watch the snow fall, big fat flat flakes that looked like postage stamps dropping from the sky. The following Sunday, I still had the cold but wanted to get out to Kansas to see if anything resembling spring was happening.....since it's spring you know...despite colds, more snow and chronic gray weather. I might have had a bad cold but I also had spring fever...as well as a case of cabin fever too.

When I got out there, the landscape was its usual winter gloomy state but at least the forsythia had turned yellow.

But still, there was soooooo much brown. I went looking for any spot of color but there wasn't that much to be found....at least I found some evidence of life.

Some little raccoon had been busy washing something in the creek earlier in the week and left these perfect paw prints.

And a deer had stopped by and reached over and munched some daylilies coming up a couple feet away (like daylilies can ever be stopped...munch away Mr. or Ms. Deer).

I saw one tiny dogtooth violet on the path in the woods. Since Tilly and Bo were with me, when I got on the ground to take a photo of it, both dogs climbed all over me while I tried to cup the flower so they wouldn't crunch it. That's Bo providing the backdrop. You can't see Tilly but she had two paws on top of me and was leaning in hard over my shoulder to see what I was protecting. That flower didn't last long.

I started to see a lot of white dogtooth violets (also known as trout lilies, fawn lilies or by their Latin name Erythronium albidum). By then I was getting good at just reaching down and blindly taking photos before the dog helpers could notice what I was doing.

I saw exactly one mayapple coming up.

Finding this electric colored yellow-shafted flicker feather was my prize find of the day. Flickers are crazy colored enough but I didn't know they carried this extra bit of colorful craziness under their wings.

This is the same feather turned around. The yellow shaft of that feather really is that dramatic. It was not hard to find in those 20 acres of brown.

I found one, exactly one milkweed plant during my walk in the woods and took some of the seeds home with me to start indoors. My project this summer is to start a milkweed garden for monarch butterfly caterpillars and I'm curious to see what kind of milkweed grows in the woods in the shade under trees on top of a dry hill... I wonder if any butterfly even found it. Oh wait, it was on the path. Every thing and every body uses those paths through the woods. I learned that when I saw all those tracks in the snow this past winter (and they weren't all dog tracks).

But that spring discovery of a dried up milkweed (although it did have seeds!) was really just another photo of a whole lot of brown. My idea of zooming in with my camera so I could block out all the brown surrounding me and focus on what little glimpses of spring that was out there was not really working here.

However, this closeup of Bo asleep with his wonderful snoring dog nose makes me feel optimistic about the future.

I might not be able to breathe easily yet but I am hopeful it will happen soon when I look at a picture of a nose that is so extra good at it.

Oh come on now!

It's spring. I get that. But does everything have to bloom in just one week's time? There are the fruit trees, the magnolias, the redbuds, the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths, the dandelions...and now there are even leaves appearing on the rest of the trees so there is some sort of green or color halo around everything out there. It's distracting. I don't know what to look at first. :-/

I came home from work today before another deluge of rain/hail/thunder and lightning hit (plants really like the excitement of all of that) and when I looked in Violet's water bowl...I saw a beetle. What kind of beetle? I could not be right. I just couldn't but my guess was confirmed when I looked it up in one of my guides.

A firefly. Huh. A firefly in April.

True...this one is a different sort than what I usually see. He's called a black firefly and is active during the day, not night, and a lot of times doesn't even bother to use his lighting equipment. But still, a firefly.

I took him outside and put him on the glider. I'm sure his confusion and slowness was due to his swimming in the water bowl for I don't know how long but I think he was also confused about where he was and how he got there...you could call it his own little "Lost" episode.

He looked too vulnerable to be left on the glider and since it looked like he was not going to be flying anywhere soon, I moved him to a daffodil in the garden. He immediately crawled around to hang on the underside of the flower.

He held on to that flower with a tight grip because a storm was blowing in and the wind was really shaking that daffodil. Look at those little hands. "Eeeeeee! Why is my world so shaky shaky?"

Poor little thing could not get his bearings. I would imagine this would be the first time he (or any firefly!) has ever seen a daffodil too.

Fireflies in the first week of April. Crazy. Just like what's going on with all the blooming flowers out there.

Whoa!!!! Settle down there!!!

Spring is moving along a little too fast.

New flowers seem to bloom hourly.

And until the squirrels start stomping on them, they are just perfection.

It's like all these plants have had a little bit too much sugar because the blooming going on in the last couple days can only be described as HyPeRacTiVe. See this new tulip?

One day later, it's already wiped out.

I remember I used to sit near a large window at work that faced a hillside across the street with forsythia growing at the top. Once forsythia decides to bloom, forsythia does it fast. Sitting across from it on that one certain day in spring was pretty darn nice. You could check on it every hour or two and watch the hillside transform from some tentative yellow in the morning to a full hill of crazy at the end of the day. The plants this year are blooming at forsythia speed. Every 8 hour shift has something new making a big arm waving appearance. All of my daffodils are in bloom (as are my early tulips) and some of the trees have that bright baby green glow when their flowers start to bloom. Soooo pretty. And of course there is SUN and when it's not raining, a bright blue sky!!!! I just love it.

I find it hard to believe there is anyone out there who does not share this enthusiasm for spring but they're out there...

...sometimes even in your own garden.