clear: light breeze: 49ºF

Here and there a clump of daffodils blooms. Nothing splashy though. Most are the very proper, ordinary yellow ones - none with Durante-sized, glowing noses or with frilly, ruffled petals. Today's blooms are the daffodils for lovers of classic gardens. The renowned English garden writer, E.A. Bowles, would have approved of this morning's blooms. He wrote of the daffodils he planted in his own garden: "I sit among the great of the Daffodil world, and see their latest productions, but the [my] garden knows them not." I, though, hardly can wait to see the garish, the ornate, the new outlandish color combinations of petals and cups, the pom-pom like ones with no cups at all, and the new soft, linen white varieties. Bring them on. I want to see the blooms of daffodils too rare, too expensive, too finicky to plant in my own garden. Forests of signs naming daffodils that are still weeks from blooming have already been put in place. I suspect that the display of daffodils this year will be particularly adventuresome since the national convention of the American Daffodil Society will be in town in early April.

A newly formed tulip bud with the grand name Triumph is huddling close to the paving stone where it was planted. Triumphs, my bulb catalogs tell me, are a cross between an early-blooming tulip and a late-flowering one. If all goes well they flower after one parent and before the other. Yet while even the early tulips are a couple of weeks from showing color, this tentative bloom of the Triumph 'White Cascade' has beaten them all to become the first tulip of spring. Some might quibble by saying that the Triumph didn't play fair because it nestled against an east-facing stone that warmed and protected it. No matter. However it happened, 'White Cascade' came in first. Tulips play by different rules than do baseball players or Olympic athletes.

Flying insects have returned. Plentiful numbers of honey bees, the old-fashioned ones that are in short supply because of the mite infestations, are pollinating the clusters of spires of tiny yellow flowers on the Oregon Grape (Mahonia aquifolium) beside the garage near the old Cleveland Avenue Gatehouse. In several places throughout the Garden there are swarms of mating midges too. I detour around their swirling globes, less out of modesty and more because I want to avoid getting one caught in my eye.

Do what you think is best: Keep your fingers crossed or say a prayer. Let there be no more hard freezes this season. The average nighttime temperature around here at this time of year is in the mid-30s, but dips to the teens and even the single digits still are possible. The fuzzy sepals that protected the magnolias all winter have cracked. Buds and even a few flowers are showing. A hard freeze just now would likely cause a browned-out spring. I always feel that these flowers of more southern places do us a kindness by just being here. The least we can do is to return the favor by making them feel welcome by letting them flower.


The blue sky is background and palette this morning. Pointing my camera up I see the silver-gray of a sycamore etched against the sky. Then because of atmospheric conditions I can't even guess at, the entire sky is filled with tracings of the contrails of high-flying jets that are using the city as a marker to find their ways to other places.

And from the Oxalis in the Temperate conservatory: a happy St. Patrick's Day