Caution: Spring Explosion Impending!

 Just yesterday morning the forsythia branches that I had in a vase on the sideboard looked like this. They were mostly still dormant and covered with tightly closed buds but the first blossom sprang open at the tip of a branch and that lovely lemon yellow made its first appearance.

This morning the bouquet looks like this. There is hardly a closed bud left in the bunch. I know it will be just as dramatic when the same performance happens outside, a bunch of sticks and then suddenly, BOOM, a flash of yellow and we'll be on to the garden season.

I am madly digging and dividing and picture snapping and sketching and thinking to myself that I really need to get a garden journal to write all of it down in. The weather yesterday and today was so lovely, a little fore-taste of what is ahead. I know that rain will come and we'll still have a few chill days before it is really full on but this lovely golden stuff is what we're headed into...and in not very long, I can hold on through the maple blossoms and the re-emergence of the grass and the first crocuses. Really, how much willpower does that take?

I have five little yellow crocuses blooming along one wall of the house and this morning I discovered a whole line of little hyacinth clusters, all down the back of our property line: little gifts from previous residents. I wonder how long ago they were planted and what the gardens looked like then. Nothing  like it does today I expect but I do wish I could see old blueprints for all the derivations of the lives our landscaping has had. You never know what lovely ideas were there that would be excavate-able. Ah for a time machine! Until then, I guess I'll settle for a pen and my trowel.

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• First crocuses of the year (wcs4.blogspot.com)
• The First Blooms of Spring (jeffreyerb.wordpress.com)
• Think Spring! (sweethomescarolina.com)
• Spring Sprang and then went back to sleep! (mickiesbloominggarden.wordpress.com)
• Flowering Branches (graceandivy.wordpress.com)
• March in the garden: Ephemerals have it made in shade, but not for long (commercialappeal.com)
• How To Force Branches to Flower (apartmenttherapy.com)