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Early Bloomers in a New Land

© Gregg Pasterick

After three weeks of a constantly spinning turnstile here, at the inn, my wife and I finally got away from the mountains and the winter for a couple days, heading for the coast and Point Reyes National Seashore. Imagine our surprise, discovering verdant slopes tumbling into the blue Pacific Ocean, full of life as well as the promise of life. Gray Whales were spouting off-shore, a variety of birds soared and zoomed and fluttered and hovered, a Bobcat hunkered down in the tall grass as we hiked by, Tule Elk foraged here and there, and an assortment of wildflowers were already in bloom.

What looked like a type of Toothwort bloomed along the shaded roadside leading to the seashore. Sea Fig and Hottentot Fig were producing great gaudy blossoms of magenta and yellow, and what might have been Gumweed was also blooming, its flowers a bit like oversized dandelions. It was a party for my eyes, so accustomed to gray and white and pine needle green.

This will be our first spring in this land so distant and different from Ohio, so we don't know if what we encountered was typical of mid-January. In any case, it was a bandage on our winter boo-boos, and has me anxious for the vernal equinox.

In years past, at more easterly longitudes, I watched for spring in the form of Killdeer and male Redwing Blackbirds, birds that returned each February. In terms of wildflowers, I was on the lookout for early bloomers like Skunk Cabbage and Coltsfoot. In central Ohio I returned to the woods near our home again and again, throughout the spring, looking for early bloomers, following the parade of spring wildflowers from the chill of February until well past May morel mushroom safaris. In northern Indiana, along Lake Michigan, the wet woods were landscaped with acres of Skunk Cabbage, and hikes at the Heron Rookery always yielded something new.

Last year, in North Carolina, the first wildflowers I joyously spotted were Henbit, Bird's-eye Speedwell, Thyme-leaved Speedwell and Common Speedwell. I spent the next two months driving back and forth along the Blue Ridge Parkway, watching the slowly evolving rainbow of colors wax and wane. This year? I suspect spring will be something I begin looking for about 3,000 feet nearer sea level, following its progress from the coast to the west, and Yosemite to the south, up the slopes to Donner Summit, where the early bloomers follow a different time table.

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