First, Roger and I want to thank you for your kind good wishes and heartfelt enthusiasm for our new home. We are pretty excited about it and really can't wait to get there. Now, when we see those new 4-pack and 6-pack organic herb and vegetable starts at the local food coop, we look with a longing that we know we can finally fulfill. Life really doesn't get much better than that.
With that infernal house search finally over we can engage in our other favorite activities with a lightness in our hearts and almost a spring in our step (hey, we're old, how springy can we be?). So we headed out to our favorite local trail Sunday and took a look around. We were pretty delighted by how much the early spring had changed the local scenery.
Right away, we saw our first Mourning Cloak and Azures of the season. We took a couple of photos of each, but only one of the Azure was recognizable. On this trail we mostly hike through forest where there's a lot of brown, earthy leaf litter under the trees. Here we saw the first wildflower colors of the season (update: pink flowers are
Dodecatheon hendersonii - shooting stars; blue flowers
Cynoglossum grande - Grand Houndstongue
)
On the trail back we passed something that Roger thought looked perhaps like a flower bud. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw this:
And an even a closer look showed us what we think is a cicada that had just emerged from this exoskeleton and was climbing down. It kept its wings closed, and scurried into the safety of the leaves. We hung out with it for a while thinking how cool it is to be with a creature that had just emerged in the first moments of its spring.
Now is the season of life and happiness in abundance! We'll keep you posted about the house when we finally get there. The days can be counted down on our fingers!
This flower is blooming under the pines and oaks in the yard at our rental. We have no idea what it is, but it called my attention when I looked out the bedroom window yesterday morning. This is the only plant like it in the yard here. We'd like it to grow at our new home, so I think we may dig it up and take it with us. It looks like the kind of plant that flowers for one or two days. No one will miss it, right? Bad tenants, bad tenants.
UPDATE: Much thanks to Wayne over at Niches and to an anonymous commenter, we now know that this beautiful plant is a Trillium kurabayashii (Giant Wakerobin). We won't be attempting to transplant it to our new home (and mostly we were kidding, although the desire was real). It is a fairly rare species and collection of its seeds from the wild is done by cultivators. We'll see if we can find a plant at a local nursery, although the literature suggests their rarity also makes them pretty pricey. Still, we're excited to have found such a beauty. Today, Wednesday morning, it is under a dusting of snow (two inches fell, but not under the trees). I hope it likes these early spring surprises.
