Pop! Pop! Pop! (or that didn't take long 2)

Bloodroot

 I took both these photos around 7:30 this morning, about two hours after the rain started. The bloodroot leaves were just poking through the hard, dry ground last evening when I got home. This plant is very nearly a one-day wonder. Its pretty, daisy-like but vaguely waxy flowers don’t last much longer than that. The flowers won’t open in today’s rain, though.

Tomorrow, when the rain clears, they will open and will almost certainly be dropping their petals by Sunday evening. And then the flowers will be done for another year. If I didn’t have this flower at the edge of my driveway, I’d probably miss seeing them most years. They come and go so quickly that unless they are underfoot, as these very nearly are, it’s easy to forget when you can find them or perhaps they come out a day or so earlier or later than you expected and that’s all it takes to miss them entirely. Fortunately for me, they are right next to the yellow-toothed violets that bloomed yesterday, so I don’t miss them.



Mayapple



The mayapples are now out of the ground by an inch or two. They were not up at all yesterday afternoon. But this morning, barely two hours after the rain began, they were already poking up through the ground. I knew the first rain would bring an explosion of new growth. But I didn’t expect it to happen quite this fast. I thought it would take a day or two, not a couple of hours. But here they are, the new plants of spring, bursting out of the ground and ready to take on the season.