Spring is just around the corner?

Although there is still snow on the ground (and piled high in parking lots) here in Champaign-Urbana, there are signs of hope. We had a big rain that washed away a lot of snow, and the recently fallen is really just a light dusting (today, anyway). Remember the photo of the beautiful yellow Adonis vernalis that I had included in a recent posting? It's usually the first perennial (not a bulb) to bloom around here. My friend Frank the Supergardener is the one who introduced me to that plant many years ago, and he has a lovely specimen as well. He sent me an e-mail photo yesterday of his adonis so far this year: LOL, it was a pic of a completely white square of snow! I e-mailed back my reply: "Looks just like ours!"

But there is hope, as I said, and here's the proof. We have several nice drifts of snowdrops, Galanthus nivalis, in the bed under the ash tree on the west side of our property. They are usually in bloom, or at least showing sprouts, by now. But this year, everything is a couple of weeks behind, it seems. In Frank's yard, however, there's a clump in a warm and sunny spot. And here's how they look right now!

Isn't that a lovely little bulb? They are real charmers. I read somewhere a while back that people had been recording their emergence date, somewhere in Germany I think it was, for so many decades that the data were useful to scientists studying weather patterns.

And what about you, dear readers? Are you living in a temperate zone climate where four seasons occur? Is spring coming soon -- or already maybe -- to your home? Or is there a wet and dry season where you live? I'd love it if you'd comment and tell me what the weather's like and what's in bloom where you are!