The rain and warmer weather always make the transition from winter to spring fun up here. The Ridge shakes off the cold and comes alive in ways big and small. I love that things always seem to follow a certain sequence, as if Mother Nature has a checklist. First, this wakes up. Then that. Then this. Every year.
One of my favorite ways to track spring’s progress up here is the flowers.
The first to pop are always the Lenten roses. No matter how cold and inhospitable things are, they are first to bloom in late February like clockwork. We’ve got a small one near the door to my basement office that I walk by a dozen times a day. It’s always a little thrill when I spot its first flowers—the quiet promise of warmer days.
They are alone in their enthusiasm for a few weeks, though. Long enough that I always wonder if this is the year they mis-timed things. That jackass bloomed early again—no way it makes it to April. But pale and delicate as they seem, they always make it. The one in the picture below is still going strong as I write this in the second week of April.
Then—right on cue, around mid-March—the daffodils pop and I know it’s on. Unburdened by any of the Lenton rose’s sense of restraint, the burst of yellow is jarring and unapologetic against the faded brown of the Ridge’s winterscape. They don’t last long, though. A week, maybe.
After that, the trillium erupts widely across the Ridge.
For some reason, we only have purple trillium up here. Dunno why. And the trillium seems always to be accompanied by bloodroot (which is a white flower, funny enough—its sap is an orange-red).
The wisteria gets serious in the first week of April. 
Then, by the second week, a wide assortment of blooms are breaking loose all over the Ridge. We even have some marigolds firing off at the moment.
And soon… One of the more enigmatic flowers on the Ridge will appear. More on that some other time.
There is another checklist happening too: Insects, then bats, then lizards, then toads and frogs, and finally—yep—snakes.
We are up to lizards so far. Gonna have to be more mindful on our walks. We always see our first timber rattlesnake before the end of April.