The Scent of Spring

The first sign of spring for me is always a delightful flowery fragrance that I call the Scent of Spring.

This year I smelled it for the first time on January 8, just outside the front door of an apartment building in my neighborhood.

The next earliest smelling (can't call it a sighting) was January 18 in 2004, so this is really early.

When I got home that night, I saw that the sweet box (Sarcocca humilis, also known as Christmas box) outside my apartment building was already in bloom. So that might be the Scent of Spring. Although my friend Janis mentioned that she smelled a daphne odora the other day, so it could have been a dahpne rather than sweet box.

Whatever it was, I know spring is coming soon. What is the first sign of spring where you live?

This blog entry was cross-posted at my new blog

Osoberry

One of my friends asked me about the plants at Hedgebrook and I had to laugh because I spent a good amount of time in my cottage writing about plants and not so much walking around in the woods and meadow and garden. Finally one sunny afternoon I grabbed my favorite plant identification book, Wild Plants of Seattle by Arthur Lee Jacobson, and went for a walk in the woods.

There are people who walk through a museum reading the captions and then stepping back and looking at the pictures, and people who just look at the pictures and let them soak in. I have to admit I am one of the former. Likewise there are people who walk through the woods, thumbing through the pages of a book trying to identify plants and people who just commune with the plants. Guess which one I am? Actually I had a good excuse. I was working on an essay about identifying plants.


I didn’t get too far into the woods because I was struck when I walked into a nearby clearing by a plant I had never seen before. It seemed to be alight in the dimness of the woods, all the leaves lifting straight up towards the sky like bright-green candles. I was able to identify it because Jacobson captured this quality in his description of the plant: “as the young green leaves awaken, they illuminate the woods with tender fresh greenery.” The photograph taken by Alyss in Portland really captures this quality. The leaves have the delightful smell and flavor of bitter cucumber.

This deciduous shrub is an osoberry, so named because bears (oso is the Spanish word for bear—I know that from going to Camp Osito as a Girl Scout) like the berries. Jacobson also gives alternate names as Indian Plum or Cherry, Squaw Plum , Bird Cherry and Skunk Bush. The scientific name is Oelemeria cerasiformis and it’s a member of the rose family (as are plums and cherries).

The common names refer to the fruit: bluish-black berries which are favorites of the birds. Jacobson says they are “juicy and melon-flavored [but] marred by a bitter tinge and big pits.” The name Skunk Bush (I assume) comes from the stinky flowers. I brought just one spray into my cottage to sketch and quickly regretted it. The flowers are delicate looking, tiny packages of petals held on drooping stems, almost like lilies of the valley, with raggedy edges but they have a terrible smell.

Every time I learn about a new plant, I fall in love with it and osoberry is my new emblem of spring.

Goat Willow Catkins on Whidbey Island

Growing up in Southern California, we never saw real pussywillows (except as imported curiosities). They were captive items, like peacock feathers or Mexican jumping beans. They stayed frozen in their soft furry grey velvet form forever.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize them at first in my Seattle neighborhood. I had walked around the same block for years without ever seeing them. Then one March, on a walk with the dog, I noticed something plopping down around me. They were spent pussy willow catkins that had thrown off their pollen and were dropping to in an orgy of dissipation.

From then on, I kept my eye on the bush and came to know all its phases. I love it best when the buds are just showing that flash of milk white, before they open. No, I love it best when the stems are studded with those soft, furry grey velvet puffs, like tiny rabbit feet. I have a vase of them sitting in my window in front of me at my writing retreat. They were blown off this tree in the high wind that came up several nights ago and I found them on the side of the road. They don’t seem to be opening despite the warmth of the cottage, which is just fine.

But I do love the next stage. Here they are on the same tree a few days later, popping out, covered with yellow pollen. I will be eager to get back to Seattle and see how the ones in my neighborhood are progressing.. I think because Seattle is warmer they will already be littering the ground.

I’ve been reading Bill Felker’s list of March Zeitgebers from Poor Will’s Almanac. In Yellow Springs, Ohio, he predicts pussy willow catkins will break in the second week and pollen will appear on the catkins in the fourth week.

Signs of Spring

I spend the entire month of January dreaming about what I want to grow in the New Year, and doing a process of sorting those dreams into themes and goals. This year I'm sharing that process with the students in my New Year Dreams class.

I'm still in the thick of it, generating lots of ideas. Launching an online magazine. Writing a historical novel. Writing essays about plants in the city. Promoting my Slow Time book to coaches and writers. Sponsoring week-long Slow Time retreats. Contributing to Wikipedia, Library Thing. Joining Facebook. Teaching a year-long Slow Time class. The new ideas keep springing forth.

I'm at the point in the process where I need to make choices. It's clearly impossible to do everything. But I'm having a harder time choosing this year than in other years. I like to choose a word for the year that distills my intention for the entire year and this year I'm having trouble with that as well. In previous years, I've picked Fun and Frolic. This year it's something more like Connecting but that's too abstract for me.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying all the signs of spring around me. The red twigs on the maples. The green blades of tulips kniving through the dark soil. The single yellow bloom on the forsythia. The fuzzy buds on the goat willow. I saw my first robin three days ago.

The Red of Spring

Red has always been the color of spring to me, particularly March.

In Bulgaria, on March 1st, people tie red and white tassels called Martenitzas around the wrists of loved ones, also cars, house doors, trees, and young animals. These tassels are protection amulets that are worn until the first stork returns, signaling the beginning of spring.

In Eastern European countries, scarlet eggs were symbols of resurrection and were placed on or buried in the graves of the family dead. A Romanian tale says that eggs are dyed red to represent the blood of Christ. But the Chinese used to exchange scarlet eggs at their Spring Festival in 900 BCE, so it is more likely the red color is the symbol of life.

The month of March is named after the Roman god, Mars, also the name of the Red Planet. Before he was the god of war, Mars was the god of fertility and vegetation. And the new growth of spring is often red.

In the days when I drove up to Clear Lake once a week to visit my mentor and friend, Helen Faris, I always loved that time during the year when the woods on either side of the highway took on a rosy flush, an almost imperceptible halo of color, slowly replaced in the weeks that followed with green.

In my neighborhood the change is a little less obvious since the trees aren't assembled en masse. I often stop to gawk at individual trees and shrubs on my walk to work, convinced they've changed but unable to say exactly how. The first inklings of spring are invisible yet apparent.

As spring rolls on and the leaves unfurl, the shift to spring becomes visible. The twigs of trees flush red at the tips. Right now, the leaves unfurling on the rose bushes are as red as the roses will be later. The new leaves of the hebe (to the left) are dark red, almost violet.

And, of course, who can miss the magic of the ubiquitous photinia, a popular shrub all over Seattle because of this--it's one trick--the bright red of the new leaves which slowly deepen to a darker, rubbery green.

Thanks to a letter posted at my favorite phenology site, Journey North, I now understand why. Anthocyanins. Those pigments that are so good for you, which are found in the skins of grapes and blueberries, are present in the cells of plants, creating the red color which acts as a sort of sunscreen protecting the plant from too much sunlight. As the plant develops, it is able to absorb the sunlight and convert it to chlorophyll, the green pigment, which overshadows the red., which won't be seen again until fall when the leaves of trees die and stop producing chlorophyll and the anthocyanins flame out in their fall colors.

The Journey North web site suggested an experiment which I carried out. I poured some purple grape juice into three cups, filled with bleach, water and white vinegar respectively. The purple color of the grape juice completely disappeared in the bleach, while it intensified in color in the vinegar and became diluted in the water. Don't know what that's supposed to prove but it was fun.

first Robin of the season

On Monday, February 18, when I was heading to the flower store to order some flowers for my Mom's birthday (which is February 19--Happy Birthday, Mom!), I noticed a bird sitting on a telephone wire above the street in front of my apartment building. He (sex uncertain?) was making a lot of noise--I'm not sure I could call all of it singing, though most of it was quite lyrical. I went running back into the apartment and asked my daughter to come out and look at the bird since she's the one with some birding experience but neither of us could tell for sure what it was. I was hoping it was a robin (I've been looking for one for weeks) but when I listened to the robin calls posted at Journey North, one of my favorite phenology sites, they didn't match.

On Friday, February 22, when I dropped off my (way overdue) books at the library, I noticed big bird with a rather fluffy orange-red chest in a tree alongside the library. I prowled around the tree for quite a while, looking up, trying to decide if it was a robin. It looked a bit odd, as if it's orange-red breast was split in two and I always think of robins as having smooth red breasts. But, thanks to Journey North's video, I realized I was seeing a robin preening. He must have felt quite safe up there in that tree as this is not an activity a robin would engage in if he (again I'm not sure of gender but apparently male robins show up first) was feeling unsafe.

I went to Journey North to see if I could figure out if my robin was a male or a female. Probably a male, as the males arrive first. They listed the following markers for Robin phenology: first male seen, first wave (a group of robins seen together), first earthworms, first robin singing (male robins mark their territory with song), first female (they come later after the male has established his turf), first male battle, nest building, incubation of eggs, young hatch, young fledge, young take wing, new nest (or next batch).

I doubt that my singer on the telephone wire was a robin since no one else in my area has reported hearing any robins sing. But it was great to look at the robin map and see the first two robin sightings in Seattle were reported by Beth, who's a School of the Seasons subscriber.

I also found a great article on the etymology of the scientific name for the American robin: Turdus migratorius. No it's not what you think. Turdus is Latin for thrush and the author explains its relationship to the word Sturdy, which originally meant "trashed" or "hammered" because of the way thrushes act after they feast on fermented berries in fall. The French have an expression which means "drunk as a thrush."

Signs of Spring in Seattle

I found this cherry tree blooming in my Capitol Hill neighborhood on December 9th. There are certain cherry trees which always bloom around this time of year in Seattle. I'm not sure why.

On December 20, the day before Winter Solstice, I found this forsythia in bloom. It was on the east side of a brick building. These plants that are right next to buildings which radiate the heat of the sun often bloom before anything else. Still it was surprising to see this sunny promise of spring so early in the year.