March 16: Latitudinal time travel

For the past few days I have been in a quick road trip north. Whenever I travel north in the spring, I feel like I'm traveling back in time. Seasonal time, anyway. I went from trees in full bloom and daffodils fading to patches of snow on the ground frozen ponds just starting to thin in places, and trees still utterly bare. It was exciting to see snow again.



I love watching the changes in types of flora too, and I rarely get to observe in winter. Up north there are lots of birch and maple and spruce. Headed south, by the time we hit central Missouri, it's almost all hardwoods, particularly oak, with the only wild conifers being southern red cedar, and the river bottoms are all filled with tall old sycamores. Finally, close to home we start to see the southern pines mixed in with everything that grows a zone or two north.

We also cross a low old mountain range, and it was uncanny the way we reached the river valley south of one range and oh, there was a wild plum blooming on the top of a ridge, and then there were white-blooming trees everywhere! In places it seemed they accounted for half the tree population. Another hour of driving, and we even spotted some redbuds blooming.

Even though I didn't have my fill of cold weather and exotic northern trees, it feels good to be home among the familiar.

March 17: Green

Green! I would say we are about 50% green in the city, where the grass and shrubs are pretty well along and it's just the hardwoods that haven't started to leaf out yet. At the farm, a higher elevation, it's maybe 40%. The pastures have got enough new growth of fescue and baby clover that we don't need to feed hay to the horses, and when you look out across the hills they look more green than yellow-brown.