In the natural world, spring is a great unfolding. Tender buds split their seams like over-laden luggage, laying out their trousseau of leaves and blossoms to freshen in the sun. Pupate insects unpack legs and lacey wings like alien landers dropped in from somewhere beyond our ken.  And everywhere trap doors fly open from the vast underground empire of roots and rhizomes to launch green armies of chlorophyll across the dead landscape to join forces with their old ally, the sun.

Few living things unfold into existence with the elegance and grace of the fern. It may just be that practice makes perfect, since ferns have been unfurling themselves in spring for hundreds of millions of years. Along with their less stately clubmoss cousins, ferns were among the first vascular plants with the capacity to circulate water and nutrients throughout their systems, unlocking new possibilities for photosynthesis through both increased size and more elaborate architecture.

Consider the fern’s place in the line-up of evolution’s great parade. First came all the single-celled microscopic pioneers with alga, pondscums, seaweeds and kelps marching behind. From this fertile stew, molds, yeasts, and fungi flung or floated spores across the dividing strand of water and land, giving solid footing to subsequent spore spawners, including mosses and liverworts. With the its innovative vascular system, in time the fern literally rose above the rhizome rat race below to cast its spores a little farther afield.

Three men started their work week at our place Monday, arriving early to knock off a small job we had for them. Two diseased and blighted crabapple trees planted too close to the house 30 years ago by a previous owner were coming down. Each tree bore the Dayglo orange mark of the condemned, casually sprayed upon their trunks the week before by the arborist who came to give us a price.

Kate and I had decided that the failing trees had to go for the sake of the garden beds beneath them, for the sake of the utility wires threading through their branches, and for the sake of our backs which seem to be perpetually bent to the task of cleaning up the blighted leaves beneath them. The flocks of birds that shuttled to and from feeders from the protection of these two trees would soon find out that none of the morning’s activities would be for their sake – they would be simply forsaken.

We had convinced ourselves that getting rid of the trees was the best course, but we weren’t prepared for the swift and skillful violence that did them in. Within one hour, both trees were transformed from the elegant architecture of branch and budding leaf, designed over the years by light, wind, and rain, to two sap-seeping stumps and a pile of chips. Three men with saws and a wood shredder with a monstrous maw undid decades of cell by cell photosynthetic construction in plenty of time for the morning coffee break.

The rise and fall of our planet’s tilting waltz around the sun moved the angle of our inclination to our favorite star across the equator to northern latitudes earlier this month. This was just after we engaged in our semi-annual compulsion to tinker with time. The vernal equinox and the return of Daylight Savings Time combined to flood the early evening hours with light. The evening daylight, of course, is not saved at all; it is simply stolen from the morning.

After struggling for months to free ourselves from the folds of winter’s dark cloak, we were finally getting up with the sun in late February and early March, until, that is, the recoil of the great spring spring-ahead kicked us early risers back into the blue hour.

The blue hour is what the French call that twilight time between the total darkness of night and sunrise when light has a quality dissociated from both day and night – not black, not white, but blue.  The implication is that being discrete, apart from the normal cycle of hours, this time is special – auspicious, even.

Why should spring be any different from the rest of us?

I know when I awaken from a long, deep sleep, there’s a little unpleasantness – in my temperament, my general aspect, and, ok, my breath, too. I try to recover my composure and comportment quickly before too many people notice. First impressions are important.

So when the vernal equinox reminds winter dreamers to rise and shine, some of the first to poke their heads from beneath their leaf-litter comforter are, let’s admit it, a little rank.

The skunk cabbage is up. Their claret colored cloaks twist up out of marshlands caked with ice and corn snow, looking like netherworld minions still steaming from a recent dip in the River Styx. And what’s that smell?

Symplocarpus foetidus is indeed fetid, not to mention a little feverish. It sweats its way up out of the frigid mud of March through cellular respiration, a metabolic process that enables it to generate temperatures perceptibly higher than the ambient air temperature. (Stick your finger in one, and see for yourself.) It is not uncommon in early March to see newly emerged skunk cabbage spathes standing on an island of thaw in an ocean of freeze.

The blossoms of these springtime stinkers are encased in the thick encircling spathes, which they wear like the hoodie of a surly teen. The foul “skunk” odor that rises on the intemperate heat mimics carrion, attracting flies as pollinators.

Spring is an old friend, and I’m more than willing to overlook this initial unpleasantness each year. To my winter-weary eye, any plant emerging from the March mud is beautiful. By April, I may be a little more discerning, but for now I love the smell of skunk in the morning.

Snow drops

South of here, winter was piling on, adding another foot of snow to mid-Atlantic states that cried uncle weeks ago. It was snowing here, too – hard at times. But on a foray into the worst of it last Friday, carrying trash from the house to the barn, I felt the season slip.

Winter in New England is brawny and bare knuckled, but its reputation stands firmly on January and February. In March the season can put on a furious show, but this is the month it goes weak in the knees. Daylight Savings Time and the vernal equinox will administer a technical knock out in a couple of weeks, but standing there last week in a white-out squall, I could feel that for this year, winter’s cause is lost.

It was both warm and wet, and the road out front was black. Heat in the asphalt pushed back against the snowstorm and was winning. Even the least of living things were pushing back. Tender green shoots of snowdrops raised tight translucent buds like clenched fists through the snow. The Lenten rose was forming new blossoms beneath a layer of ice. And olive drab finches were pushing gold from the alchemy of their little electric hearts up through the down on their breasts.