What’s so great about spring? Fresh veggies, warm sunshine, baby animals, bird song and the water fowl return to the creek!
Canada geese, great egrets, blue herons, ducks and other geese varieties along with seagulls, and other non-water birds.
A few days ago I went on a half-day 42-foot catamaran cruise to watch Christopher Newport University (CNU) sailing team in a competition with other schools. On a beautiful, blustery day at the mouth of the Warwick River off the James, I caught great shots of the competition along with several gliding pelicans, swimming Canada geese and a beached deadrise (fishing boat). Spring days are for such things as these.
The sailing competition was a photo shoot for an upcoming story on CNU’s sailing team, but the extraneous shots were an effort to capture some of the birds in my backyard in a more active fashion. The pelicans caught me by surprise as we don’t see that many up the creek.
I fell in love with pelicans in April 2015 when my daughter, Lauren, married her love Geoff Rogers. The wedding party stayed on the beach of Edisto Island just south of Charleston, South Carolina. (That’s a whole other post I will feature in the Travel section of the blog in future.)
Back to spring’s beauty and other assets: One thing everyone loves about spring from an aesthetic standpoint is the burst of blooms that seem to know just when to appear so we can tell it’s a new season. Forsythia, redbud trees, tulip poplars, azaleas (wild and cultivated), phlox, vinca, tulips, daffodils, crocus, Lenten roses, and the indomitable flowering weeds. Yes, I said, weeds.
From the time I was a little girl, I believed the spring-flowering weeds were just as pretty as the planted garden varieties. I loved henbit’s purple trumpet flowers, sunny yellow dandelions (especially the wisps you could blow and infect the lawn), purple and white violets, hairy bittercress with its tiny white blooms, creeping speedwell veronica with it’s tiny blue flowers and dead nettle with its purple flowers and leaves.
Weeds never seem to run out of energy to reproduce themselves and be one of the first to say, “It’s spring!” Since they leave such a bad taste in gardeners’ mouths, it’s a good thing they possess such a hearty persistence.
I love flowering weeds. Actually, aren’t most native plants weeds? They come up on their own given the right conditions and thrive well in their given environment. Think about it — You put a garden border around a clump of henbit and you got a garden by definition. Right?
Happy Spring Everyone,
Cathy
Anybody else out there like weeds? If you have a story to tell about playing with weeds as a child, making bouquets for your mom with them, etc. share it here. I know I would love to read it and bet others would too!
