What is so exciting about buds on plants and bulb flowers sending up shoots? Is it the prospect of spring? Life renewing itself? A change of texture in the world? Whatever it is, plants are fattening up their buds and sending up shoots, and it’s wonderful.
It’s so wonderful, in fact, that people sometimes stand around just looking at them. A neighbor and I found ourselves by the front garden this week, admiring bulb shoots of various colors and sizes and chatting about the daffodils and tulips and hyacinths coming up around the neighborhood. As the dog and I walked down the hill one day, we surprised another neighbor who was standing quite still and with her back to us as she gazed, rapt, at a Japanese maple in glorious red bud. The tree was well worth looking at, the shape elegant and the color so welcome after winter’s white and gray.
A recent email from the university’s botanical gardens announced they had spring beauty in bloom. I haven’t even seen foliage for spring beauty in the woods near us, so I made the trip to Dixboro Road this afternoon and hiked some of the trails. Not the right trails, it seems, as I saw no hint of spring beauty, but I did see a fair amount of luscious red.
Some of the red was skunk cabbage putting in its first appearance of the year. Skunk cabbage doesn’t send leaves up first, or flowers. It sends spathes. (Think jack-in-the-pulpit without Jack.) The spathes are thick and curvy, a deep mottled red. Striking. Strange. Suggestive of alien life forms or something prehistoric and carnivorous. Late winter is a good time of year to come across skunk cabbage. Come spring, when the plant flowers, it smells like carrion. To each pollinator, its own. Ew.
The other red at the botanical gardens was red osier dogwood. The twigs are the red part, the shrub is twiggy, and the gardens have a lot of it. Long views there are often full of bright vertical red lines, enough color to tide you over till spring.
Yellow is also returning to the world. Daffodil buds are beginning to color up, and weeping willows are distinctly golden, from crown to ground. At least one other weeping tree in the neighborhood is not faring so well. It’s a weeping cherry whose owners got so carried away pruning it that its branches are only about a foot long, giving it the look of a freshly shorn Marine. It should probably be renamed a vaguely depressed cherry.
While walking the dog and listening to the red-winged blackbirds this morning, I heard another sound I could not, at first, identify. Staccato. Woodpecker-ish, but too loud, and not the right timing. Back and forth like competing cardinals or dueling banjos. At last, my mind identified the sound: nail guns. Dueling nail guns. There is new construction on Nixon Road, and farther down the road an apartment complex is getting a new roof. Peck-peck-peck-peck. Peck-peck-peck-peck. I wonder what woodpeckers make of the sound—good stamina but no soul?
We’ve returned to winter temperatures. There’s warmth in the sun, but the wind gusts are bracing. The direction you’re walking relative to the direction the wind is blowing makes a real difference in comfort. All in all, walkers engage in a lot of unzipping, un-hooding, and un-gloving, followed closely by zipping, re-hooding, and re-gloving. It’s March in Michigan.
This is also the time of year when my thoughts turn daily to my dear mother-in-law. Her interest in the natural world remained bright until the end, despite her having lost her vision to glaucoma. She listened eagerly when I described for her what she remembered acutely but couldn’t see any more. She was especially pleased with the notion of trees feathering out again. She knew exactly what that looked like, but hadn’t thought of the phenomenon in those terms. Everywhere around us now, the trees are feathering out, and my heart is full of Eleanore’s grace.
19 March 2021