Snapshot: Early March 2010

Beach - or Moutnain Maple toss red pom poms high.  As is, you  can identify maple right now - while driving 60mph -- just by looking for the red tinge scattered in the roadside wood-hedge.

These look a tad like Claytonia, but with only four petals and the bloom smaller than a paper punch, I think not.  Anyone have a guess.  They are super small and easy to miss.

 I guess I should figure out what these are, as they are one of those things that jump from the winter landscape. (I think the berries may be there in some form late fall, or even into mid Spring, but they don't seem to jolt the eyes unit the winter kill has left the world of all-other-color drained.

Daffodils bolt bold from the soggy cardboard sod.

March 7, 2010:    For whatever reasons, Spring seems to be on a slow-mo start this year, which may be all the better, given the clobbering certain early blooms took in the last three years. (Hard to imagine now, but just over two weeks ago, the ground was all monolithic white.) As is, I am deeply aware of a small handful of “indicators” – things I use to mark the sense of season. Three years ago, the Japanese Magnolia outside the Arkansas State Capitol Building opened abruptly in the first week of February -- only to be freeze-dried in a temperature dive just hours after bloom. They quickly turned a coffee brown. A year later (2007) they opened more or less in the first week of March, but then were coated by two freak snows, March 6 and March 9. Last year, the same blooms took off mid Feb to late March, but seemed locked in a slow-mo killing cold, and never just shouted. This year, as of March 6 the blooms have yet to crack skin and crest.

Seems too, that the daffodils and Maples are about a week or so behind.

As is, I found out last year that our major maples – the Silvertip and Sugar Maples flower later, but several other breeds (Red, Beach) are in now in full floral bloom. Look for a red mist hanging around the tips of trees littered in the woodlands. Chances are if you see rust or red up high, they are a maple.

Beyond that, the larger world is still pretty much the color of cardboard, with the first kelly tuffs – clover and henbit pushing thought the muck.