It's spring! Really! Finally!
We thought spring would never happen, and there's still a cold wind mostly days. But all the signs are there: daffs, tulips, the trees starting to leaf out. Out at City Forest early in the morning, there were some happy signs of renewal. We spotted the fernlets first. Skunk cabbage may be my all-time favorite sign of spring. It's showy, captures the light beautifully, and has those wonderful reproductive things whose names I have to look up every year: a spadix enclosing a spathe (like a jack-in-the-pulpit). It can generate its own heat to melt the ice and snow. It can lift and lower itself in the ground. And it has a Latin name to reckon with: symplocarpus foetidus. Something is getting ready to leaf out; I don't know what: Are these alder catkins? Whatever they are, they looked fabulous in the morning sun. Enough so that you might forget that's a landfill in the background. Oh well. The bobolinks like all that grass!