...Especially when it's a day such as the last 24 hours have been, warm, mostly sunny, partly windy, all around beautiful. Yesterday morning's round buds...
are today's
hepatica flowers!
Mayapples popped open their still-tiny umbrellas.
Ginger leaves burst through the soil.
And trillium's three-leaves have appeared.
Couldn't resist showing the
bloodroot again, now that the flower bud has poked out.
In the non-ephemeral plant world, here's the yellow coneflower, which emerged a while ago but I was struck by how big it's already gotten, about 4 inches tall.
And, my maple-leaf
vibernum leafed out... along with some crab apples and other shrubs.
Unfortunately, these leaf-outs are not all good. Throughout the yard, previously nearly-invisible little sticks have sprouted
buckthorn leaves... they are everywhere, these little weeds that want to be terribly invasive, soil-poisoning trees. And among them are tiny leafing-out box elders (whose parents are flowering at the moment). I could work for days and days, it seems, and still have these invasive babies around. The honeysuckle, which has become the bane of our gardening existence, has also leafed out. (When I installed my vegetable garden on the south side of the yard, there was a honeysuckle hedge, about 8 feet tall, in the neighbor's yard, that did not interfere with the garden. Six years later, those things are about 20 feet tall and shade out more of the growing space each year. The boughs that hang over our yard get chopped, but the trees are not ours to level. I could make a lovely garden in that area, though, if I were allowed...)
And speaking of the garden... we planted carrots and peas this morning, to go along with the spinach that I didn't mention we planted earlier in the week.
