Holding on to Spring

Wanting to remember the beautiful flowers of spring, here's Julie's apple tree blossoms.

So delicate.

One of my favorites, the Trout Lily, gets its name from its leaves, some say, whose purplish blotches resemble the markings on some kinds of trout and from the fact that the plant is often found near woodland streams in which these fish live.

John Burroughs preferred to call it fawn lily, partly because he thought the leaf mottling resembled the markings on a young deer.  In the 1890s, he wrote "It is the earliest of the true lilies, and it has all the grace and charm that belong to this order of flowers... In my spring rambles I have sometimes come upon a solitary specimen of this yellow lily growing beside a mossy stone where the sunshine fell full upon it, and have thought it one of the most beautiful of our wild flowers.  Its two leaves stand up like fawn's ears, and this feature with its recurved petals, gives it an alert, wide-awake look." 
 (from Hedgemaids and Fairy Candles)

I like that.

Spring Beauty 

I thought I had taken a picture of the Cutleaf Toothwort, (but no cut leaves) as they were blooming near the Trout Lilies, but I'm sure these are Spring Beauty.  Five petals.  Another name for the spring beauty is the "fairy spud" as i am reading that the tiny underground tubers can be prepared and eaten just like potatoes!

Virginia Bluebells

 Miranda Lambert sings a song about these beautiful blue flowers.

Carrying the weight on the end of a limb

your just waitin for somebody

to pick you up again

shaded by a tree, can't live up to a rose

all you ever wanted 

was a silent place to grow...