First days of spring…
A collection of blooms from the first day of spring through the first weekend of spring (where we suffered under temps 20° above average 🥵)…plus some critters.
I’ve talked about the tulips before. The violets are rescues, as are the red violas; they were dug up and thrown away with much more blooming to go, and our plumber rescued them and shared. The white violas are ones that self-seeded last summer from the ones rescued from the plumber last February, and they have continued blooming all winter and now into spring.
I mentioned the peach tree before, too. The bluebells, like the tulips, are remnants of bulbs we planted many years ago; these particular ones are volunteers that popped up one year under a large oak outside the kitchen window. They’re the first to bloom this year since the deer got the ones in the front yard and the ones planted in the back yard get quite a lot of shade now.
These small daffodils (I’ve heard some call them jonquils) are the fifth or sixth (and final) variety to bloom. They were here when we bought the house, along the edges of one island, and bloom prolifically at the end of daffodil season. The carpet bugle (Ajuga) was yet another of the plants/flowers that my grandmother sent home with us decades ago; in that time, it’s moved all around as the light and conditions have changed.
The forsythia is having a decent blooming this year, despite the vagaries of the winter and the half-dozen or more false springs and false summers followed by hard freezes we’ve had. In years when the conditions are good, they’re almost like a vast carpet of yellow. Likewise, the dogwoods have been hit pretty hard by the early warmth followed by freeze, in their case the one at the beginning of the month coaxing the buds out and then freezing them. Still pretty, but not nearly as plentiful as normal—or what once was normal.
I noticed on Friday that I’d scared Mrs Bluebird out of the box one time when I came outside, so I thought I’d make a quick check of the box. We knew they’d been building a nest earlier in the month, but I hadn’t seen much activity so I hadn’t checked up. Imagine my surprise to find 4 eggs! (Checked again Saturday and still 4 eggs, so this clutch is complete, but I have no idea how far along in incubation they are since I don’t know when laying began/ended.) First of the season!
Out working in the yard on Friday, I saw this large American toad had built almost a burrow in the leaves on a hillside. Then that night, I caught this Cope’s gray tree frog on the side of a bucket.
This weekend I also saw (but was unable to photograph) a green anole, a green tree frog, a common buckeye, an eastern tiger swallowtail, and some sort of small butterfly, probably a hairstreak.
Whew! Busy start to spring!
