First colors of spring

Spring is my favorite season because it brings warmth and color to end winter’s cold and gray. The original owner of my house planted a lot of bulbs in a large bed in the middle of my front yard, and the daffodils are always the first to poke out their heads. They have become my annual confirmation of spring’s arrival, and I look for them every day starting about mid-March.

When we went to Tennessee for spring break, I hoped their blossoms would be farther along than ours here in Indiana, and I wasn’t disappointed. These tree flowers had a delicate, sweet scent.

It’s funny how I started paying attention to flowers only after I started to enjoy photography a few years ago. Before that, I didn’t care about them at all, and hardly noticed them. What a shame that it took me until my 40s to appreciate them. But a consequence of getting such a late start is that I have no idea what most of them are called. Your comments on my annual posts about the flowers I photograph along the roadside have helped me identify several flowers, but I still have a long way to go. These red flowers, which were also freshly blossomed in Tennessee, are yet another I can’t name.

I look to photograph the smallest flowers, because I think most people overlook them.

I had never seen anything like this before. I’m not even sure it’s a flower. Maybe it’s a Tennessee thing.

I hoped that when we returned from our trip that Indiana’s spring flowers would have begun to bloom, and I wasn’t disappointed. I don’t know what these little flowers are called, but they come up every year in my front bed.

My grape hyacinths were up. My mother planted these – at least once a year, she visits bearing plants from her own extensive gardens and spends an afternoon digging in my dirt. I’m glad she does it, because I don’t enjoy gardening very much. (But I do love to mow the grass.)