Spring By Fits and Starts

After a few days of surprisingly warm weather last week, the earliest spring buds just popped and suddenly the hillsides were covered in the soft green that I usually associate with the second week of April or so. But here we are with green things and chilly temperatures today. Closer to what I would expect for April 1st, but not necessarily my favorite weather.

Friday was so beautiful, though! Christine and I took the dogs for a walk up the North Fork of the Moormans River in Sugar Hollow. We met at The Barn Swallow, which has become a favorite place of mine for finding antiques, textiles, etc. I found a leather and paper-bound book called A Walk With Me by Gwen Frostic with these beautiful, simple woodblock prints on heavy weight paper. A little digging revealed that she was born in 1906 and passed away in 2001, and is quite famous in Michigan for her nature prints and poetic writing. The book is just really beautiful, and I have someone in mind who will love it as a birthday present soon. Once in Sugar Hollow we encountered even more natural beauty in spring's first wild flowers along the trail. We saw Cutleaf Toothwort, Hepatica and Bloodroot. Cutleaft Toothwort, cardamine concatenata

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is one of the first spring flowers to bloom and has a red root sap that Native Americans used to dye baskets and clothes. It's endangered in this area, so I didn't pick any to see the sap for myself, but it seems well-protected in Sugar Hollow.


The Round-Lobed Hepatica (anemone americana) grew in clumps and tufts in sunny areas and is named for its leaves, which resemble the human liver (hepatic=liver in Latin!). According to Christine, early botanists used to believe that plants shaped like human organs could be used to treat disease in that part of the body, so Hepatica was used for liver ailments, although it apparently doesn't have any medicinal qualities.

And we've finally found a place to live for the next year and a half! I think we'll feel settled enough that I'll finally do some planting and composting of my own. We won't move in until May 1st, so you'll have to wait until then for photos of our new diggs. It's a another white cottage on a farm (are you surprised?)-only this time, bigger cottage and bigger farm (We're movin' on up...)