Stand Back, Flowers at Work.

5-3-15 VERMONT: The last two days have been beautiful, warm and mostly sunny, although it’s getting cloudy this afternoon. Buds and shoots are popping open as if they are making up for lost time because of the long winter. Daffodils are showing some flower buds. In other years they have been open in mid-April.

The pond is clearer than it has been for years. Is it the treatments we have used the last couple of years or the very cold winter? Newts, fish, crawfish, frogs and turtles are all present and accounted for. I saw four turtles yesterday all basking in the sun for most of the afternoon. I did the initial pond treatment for this summer. The frog opera is performing nightly.

I also saw a bat flitting around yesterday in the late afternoon, but well before dark. It seemed well, but I have no real way to judge its state of health.

I managed to put away the driveway reflectors that we use as guides for the snow plowers. A job that usually takes ten minutes took an hour on crutches.

New blooms: blood root, hepatica, forsythia, primrose.


Early primrose.

Hepatica. The flowers also come in blue/purple and pink. These stems are furrier than usual.

Blood root with its odd leaf.

More blood root. These are very short-lived flowers.