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.

Two gloomy Sundays before the first day of spring

It had been several weeks since I visited Aussie and her posse because of precipitation in all its forms...fog, rain, sleet, frozen rain, snow, hail...you name it. But when I got out there two Sundays ago (albeit kind of late in the day), it might as well have been raining because it was so darn gloomy.

The lingering snow from the past couple weeks had melted and had been carried swiftly down the creek, flattening the grass growing along the banks. It's amazing what just one foot of moving water can do. I remember one time driving past a golf course one day after a flash flood and didn't figure out until much later that all the pumpkins decorating the green were not placed there intentionally. The flash flood had found a stand of them somewhere and carried them onto the golf course and left them all shiny bright in what looked like a planned Halloween display.

After a big storm or snow melting period, I look for things that get carried down the stream. My catch of the day was this big bundle of electrical wire.

I kept thinking of the Japanese tsunami that had happened two days before because one foot of rushing water is something. So is several feet. But a tsunami? A wall of water thirty feet high? Incredible. That footage of a port city that was there and then seven minutes later gone, I can't get that image out of my thoughts. The visual is so surreal, it's right up there with the 9/11 image of an airplane parked in the middle of the World Trade Center. I might have been out in Kansas looking to see if spring was happening yet... but the tsunami in Japan was what was really occupying my mind.

The "Hello Yellow" candy lily was a hesitant spot of green hiding behind its dried up old self.

A few seeds from that plant are starting to germinate in my bathroom window...

The Zizia aptera was coming up. I was excited to see that because I had planted these plants so late in the year. Zizia is a native wildflower that is a host plant for the Black Swallowtail caterpillar (you can't have butterflies if you don't feed the caterpillars).

The flower is a dainty and sparse umbel of bright yellow but the fragrance is incredible. Incredible. When I brought three little plants back from the Powell Gardens plant sale last spring, they scented up the car.

The surprise lilies were doing a very good job of coming up (the daffodils, however, were still sleeping in).

It looked like the forsythia waaaaay back there was just starting to turn yellow, or at least thinking about it.

When I was out there last Sunday, all the plants still looked about the same (the daffodils were putting more effort into coming up though). The woods looked the same too...just dried out brown wherever you looked.

Aussie, her posse and I crossed the bridge leading to that very steep hill.

This is the view from where we had just been. Lots of nothingness. And lots of nothingness in front of us. But on that day I decided to persevere and find those elusive property markers I'd been looking for for over a year.

Up the hill and over and down and across yet another creek, I finally saw the markers in the distance and also got to see something a little bit unusual for what was going on in the woods that day. The trees in that area wore lichen polka dots on them. Kind of took me by surprise. That polka dot on the bottom there almost looks like a peace sign. And as Meg pointed out, the tree behind it is actually making a peace sign!

Throughout all this hiking, there was the sound of cows in the background. Lots and lots of moooooOOOooooos. I had tried to take a picture of the calves the month before but before I could get out of the car, they had all turned their backs or did something to make them decidedly unphotogenic. :-/

Spring's happening but it's rather a somber one....despite dogs, polka-dotted trees, mooing cows and peace signs.

And then it snowed.

Gardening with dogs

Some digging needed to be done.

Tilly (in the front there) was the one who got it all started.

Everyone had excellent form.

Go, Tilly, go!

Elvis started to slack off and roll around in the dead leaves. Tilly had to take a break and go over and ask her dad what the heck was going on...in a nice way of course, because she is a very good puppy daughter.

Aussie got in there and started digging her own hole.

And finally Tilly got hold of what was giving them so much trouble underground.

An irrigation system. I had no idea there was a network of soaker hoses connected under all that dirt.

The daylilies and irises probably benefited from all that um, aeration too.

Okay, Aussie. If you keep digging you're going to make it to China in no time. I think it's time to stop...

...and take a water break.

Last November, Pix and her Mr. Pix brought me some little sassafras treelets from their hacienda. Tilly helped me dig the hole for them.

Once I covered the hole with mulch and convinced Tilly that her job was done, she ran on over to be with her brother and father and two aunts. Work time was now over. Play time was on!

Aussie continued to supervise absolutely everything of course.

Sassafras trees are supposed to be very difficult to transplant but the ones that Tilly and Aussie helped me get into the ground are alive and as of Sunday, sprouting new buds.

Those dogs might be a little too enthusiastic with their digging but I just look at it (this time) as a lot of help from some extra green thumbs....or paws.....or something. And regarding the irrigation system, I never would have known about it unless some motivated pup pulled part of it out of the ground.

(By the way-no moles or mice or snakes or any sort of underground varmint were hurt or discovered in this weekend excavation.....surprisingly.)