Coltsfoot, Spring Sunshine Sprouting
A happy accident, and drops of sunshine sprouting from the earth
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So here’s a thing about springtime in Maine, at least in our little corner of Maine. It can be rainy. Very rainy. And muddy. Very muddy. In fact, this time of year when we’re pulling out the maple taps but not yet planting crops is just “mud season.” The prevailing soundtrack is a light and steady patter of rain on wet leaves and the sucking-squelching sound of rainboot footsteps.
The land is bronzed, mulch-y and leaf-y, woven with strands of last year’s grasses, not yet greening, not yet sprouting. In our flower beds, early bulbs emerge, crocus and chionodoxa and hyacinth - but in the wild meadows and orchards, the land is still drowsy, absorbing, preparing.
Misty skies host steady drizzle, and the land drinks it up gratefully and stores it away against a dry summer. But it can make for very pale days, very gray, sunshine tucked away for later. Except…
When the skies aren’t ready to deliver spring sunshine, the earth will take a turn instead!
Coltsfoot came to us in a happy accident. We had ordered Lady’s Mantle, and planted it as a companion plant for our orchard trees. But in the spot where we had planted it, the next year, this came up instead!
What a surprise! The thing about Coltsfoot is that it noses its little blossoms into the world before anything else. One day, you have a brown field. The next day, droplets of golden sunshine are scattered like stars whimsically transposed into terrestrial form.
We eventually figured out that this was Coltsfoot, an introduced perennial that is now widespread pretty much globally. These teeny pink stalks push through the leaf litter first, unfurling immediately into sunshine blossoms that open for the day and tuck away at night.
As the days grow warmer, the stalks will grow taller, eventually diffusing into dandelion-fluff seedheads. Only after the flower stalks have died back completely will summer’s thick green leaves appear.
And so it is that on a rainy spring day, I don’t look up to the sky for sunshine…
I look down at my feet!
What is your favorite spring blossom, and what about it says “spring” to you?
Your writing and passion feel like sunshine too!
Damask roses mean spring to me and whenever i go to our villa-garden and see the damask rose shrub and those pink, beautiful blossoms, i wanna just sit and look at them (Honestly, i don't just sit and look at them. I pick them, especially the half-opened ones, dry them for later use. Although its thorns leave marks on my arm, i love doing so).