Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
March 21, 2019
Since 2007 I’ve kept small notebooks listing the flowers I’ve seen (or my best guess at identifying those flowers). In among the flower names are other observations: weather, wildlife, scents, sounds.
I’ve gathered up some of these images to imagine spring while we wait for the year’s first blooms: skunk cabbage, snow trilliums, marsh marigolds, pasqueflowers.
Where spring begins: the early woods
Pale sun lights up the wet leaves on the forest floor
Tiny scattered violets
False rue anemones like drifts of random snow
Gracefully falling soft yellow bellwort
A flood of Virginia bluebells abuzz with bees
A tree creaks
A bald eagle flies along the river silently
The river itself almost silent except where it rolls over stones
By a hillside spring marsh marigolds explode.
Each tree on the hillside wears a skirt of trout lily blooms
Sunlight through last year’s purple-red leaves of sharp-lobed hepatica
A colony of Mayapples in bud like commuters under umbrellas in the rain
By the edge of the ravine a small congregations of Jack-in-the-pulpit
Fern heads unfurling like a klatch of people, heads turned toward each other
Bright white bloodroot as though it has been dropped from the sky
A whole laundry line full of Dutchman’s breeches drying in the springtime breeze
A fat bumblebee diving deep into a blossom.
Tiny ephemeral pool among the roots of a plant
Clumps of frogs jumping
Geese calling, river running
A woodpecker rattles
A few gnawed bones
A day rich in dwarf trout lilies
their buds no bigger than the white part of my littlest fingernail
The green forest lit with flowers where before we saw only leaves
Spring this year breaks open my heart.
Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
