There is a subtle yet palpable excitement that I feel at this time of year. The colorful, organized seed racks are on prominent display at grocery, hardware, and do-it-yourself stores. Established nurseries and greenhouses have been busy for months sowing seeds into flats for vegetables and flowers. The pop-up garden centers are setting up their hooped greenhouses on pavement, surrounded by pallets of fertilizer, potting soil, and mulch. And the Spring plant material is arriving!
I also love the coming alive of the trees, shrubs, and perennials in our yard and woods. The quickly evolving changes demand a daily walk-about to see what has emerged from the dormant branches or the warming earth. After a fairly dry winter and early spring, the heavy gray skies on Sunday showered us with a half-inch of much-needed rain.
The grass turned green before our eyes, and the maple tree flowers opened their red buds to pompoms of scarlet and yellow.
A leopard frog leaped through the yard towards the house, her belly swollen with eggs.
Gray pussy willow catkins and yellow-flowering forsythia are the harbingers of Spring.
While the demure pussy willow is often overlooked, it is hard to ignore the sunshine bright forsythia when the flowers burst forth from their origami buds.
The rain prompted the growth of day lilies and irises, rising like the phoenix from the ash of dried leaves and last year’s rubble.
Rosettes of sedum popped through the river rocks on the warm, southwest side of the house.
A crinkly raspberry leaf unfurled from the ivory bud, shimmering and full of potential.
Clusters of lime green needles emerged from the woody stems of one of our petite larch trees. Larch are deciduous conifers that can grow 80-120 feet tall. Our trees are less than a yard tall–babies with a long life before them.
Sprays of buds adorned the lilac shrubs, each plump green leaf bud tinged with violet, foreshadowing the fragrant flowers yet to come.
I saw my first Robin last evening, the feathered harbinger of Spring. The vest of red-orange covering his rotund belly was bright against the gray tree branches. Welcome home to the North Country!
Spring is the Happy New Year in the seasonal life of Nature. It is a time of anticipation and excitement for a new growing season for the diverse Kingdom of Plants and for the next generation to take its place in the Kingdom of Animals. Plants embody the literal translation of ‘turning over a new leaf,’ while we embrace new beginnings and fresh starts.
The beginning of a New Year on January 1st has little data to prove itself beyond the calendar hanging on the wall. But Nature’s New Year has abundant and hearty proof that we can all begin anew and make a fresh start! When things seem impossible, we must remember to witness a tree transforming from a gray skeleton to a richly robed specimen. When the music is gone from our lives, we need only to experience the symphony of spring peepers or the melody of robins to know at our deepest level that Hope lives and sings in our soul.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!
–Henry David Thoreau
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