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Guest Essay

On the Wild Intoxications of Spring

By Margaret Renkl

Mar 11, 2024

I spied the first spring beauty of the year on Feb. 20, the same week a Northern flicker started drumming on our metal chimney, the week of budburst for our red maple sapling and our young red mulberries. At our house, these are the most reliable harbingers of spring: pink-pollened flowers in the leaf litter, a woodpecker signaling his territory to a potential mate, sap rising in branches still low enough to watch their buds burst into bloom.

As soon as the spring beauties spring up and the red maple blossoms and the flicker arrives at dawn to drum out his song of love and homeownership, I know it won't be long before the chipmunks wake up from their sleeping chambers in tunnels beneath our house, skinnier now than when they moved down there last fall .

The bluebirds often start house-hunting much earlier than they intend to nest, but the first flicker concert at dawn and the first spring beauty opening in the afternoon sun -- they're for real. Soon the great rat snake, a prolific five-footer, and the one-eyed turtle will wake, too, and the broadhead skinks will come back to conduct their courtship on our front stoop . Soon the crows will be stalking through the wild parts of the yard after a rain, collecting long, damp stalks of grass to line their nests with.

This year spring beauties came a little late compared to last year (Feb. 16), but still very early compared to the year before that (March 20). I greet these tiny flowers with a flush of delight whenever they appear, but I am especially joyful when they don't arrive until at least a few days later than when I first start looking for them. My happiness is twofold. Spring is here! But also: Thank God it didn't come too terribly early this year.

I keep track of such emergences now. The unfolding Anthropocene is never far from mind, a simmering disquiet even when no overt calamity is in the news, and I take my comforts wherever I can find them. During January's snowmageddon , I kept reminding myself that surely more than a week of snow and ice would mean a somewhat more timely arrival for the spring ephemerals. And so it did, at least in our yard.

Ephemerals are tiny, low-growing woodland flowers that emerge before the hardwood trees leaf out, while sunlight can still make its way to them on the forest floor. Ephemerals produce pollen just as overwintering insects begin to awake. Long before the cultivated flowers in my pollinator garden bloom, long before there are buds on the serviceberries and the dogwoods and our yard's lone wild plum tree, tiny wildflowers are feeding the bees.

There are fewer ephemerals in our half-acre yard than in an actual forest, of course. They fare well here anyway because my husband and I use no lawn poisons or insect sprays, and because we leave the fall leaves where they fall. Decomposing leaves and brush are the natural world's food and the natural world's blanket.

It's been a rainy spring so far, and blue wood violets and pink spring beauties are spread out across the yard now like confetti in the damp leaves. There's even a patch of Jacob's ladder, which unlike the violets and the spring beauties did not arrive on its own. Several years ago I transplanted a clump of Jacob's ladder from a friend's yard, and I hold my breath a little every year, hoping it will come back, never certain it will.

Wildflower seeds generally arrive on the wind or the coats of traveling animals, or in the bellies of birds. In one way of looking at it, the wildflowers choose their own place to settle in: Seeds will sprout, grow and thrive only when conditions are right, which means that transplanting wildflowers is never a sure thing.

Last year I transplanted a patch of wild pansies from an elderly neighbor's yard , one of the few nearby that isn't treated with poisons, but so far I have seen no sign of them here this year, although they are already blooming profusely in hers. I'll try again to transplant a clump, preparing for the day when her house, too, falls to developers, the lot scraped one end to the other.

Most newly emerged native bees are generalists, happy to make use of any native flower at hand, but some are specialists , able to feed on only one flower or flower group. Spring beauty mining bees , for instance, can feed only on the pink pollen of spring beauties. The host plants of a different mining bee, Andrena violae, are wild violets . When specialist bees emerge in springtime to a yard that's been scorched and cleared of weedy flowers, the yard's whole population will die out.

Lately, giant yellow and brown centipedes have been crawling out of the leaf litter. After a rain, for reasons that escape my understanding, they like to walk around in the damp street -- easy pickings for the crows that come searching for soft grasses for their nest. Last week brought near-daily rains, and twice I stooped to admire a millipede in the street and then watched a crow grab it and carry it up to a tree branch the moment I stood and walked away. Crows know the dangers of the street even if millipedes do not.

And the songbirds know the danger of crows. Knowing that crows will rob their nests to feed their own babies, the other birds keep quiet when crows are in the yard. Otherwise it's an endless chorus, not just at dawn but all day long. Birdy birdy birdy birdy, cheer cheer cheer , sings the redbird. C'mere c'mere, c'mere, come! calls the Carolina wren. Yes, yes, heeeeeeeeeeeeere. Yes, yes, heeeeeeeeere , sings the song sparrow. Fee bee fee bay, fee bee fee bay , sings the Carolina chickadee. Singing and singing and singing -- the whole day long, it's blooming wildflowers and cool rains and singing and singing and singing.

I listen to them while I kneel to peer into the spring beauties, looking for a tiny bee dusted with pink pollen, and I think of one of my favorite lines from E.B. White: "Notes on springtime and on anything else that comes to mind of an intoxicating nature." What else is there to write about in springtime but anything that comes to mind of an intoxicating nature? It's been a dark winter of worries, but the wildflowers are blooming and the birds are singing again. It feels like coming home.

Margaret Renkl , a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books " The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, " " Graceland, at Last " and " Late Migrations ."

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