Not so long ago, the foliage of my snowdrops suddenly drooped, and all the flowers disappeared. The golden aconite blossoms in the alley wilted at the same time. Janet's early patch of violet snow crocus disappeared overnight.
Now the border between those earliest flowers and the next floral seasons is easily drawn. Almost immediately after the snowdrops' disappearance, the land produces an entirely different language: daffodils and the large crocuses open.
My hedge of yellow forsythias, and then the carpet of blue squills and then the first purple grape hyacinths and tulips write a new story in a new script and with a new message. They create a text with their new shapes and new space which literally rewrote time's signs and signatures.
They are languages that translate the previous phase of precocious bulbs into an entirely, different set of symbols written in and shaped from the ground itself, they tell a radically different story, the story of April and middle spring instead of March and the chill of early spring.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Wills Almanack. I'll be back again next week with more notes on nature and the seasons. In the meantime, watch the landscape write the language of April.
