According to the calendar, spring arrived on March 20th, but that doesn't mean New England suddenly turned into a balmy green oasis on that date. It takes a long time for the sun to warm up the earth in our part of the world. Despite our snow's reluctance to disappear, however, there are many harbingers of spring encouraging us to believe it is just around the corner. The first ones to appear on Locust Hill are the red fuzz that suddenly bursts forth on the silver maple outside the bedroom window and the pussy willows showing their stuff in the marshy area of the pasture.
Besides the red fuzz of the maple and the soft fuzz of the pussy willows, Locust Hill has several other hopeful forerunners of the warm weather to come. The sound of newborn lambs bleating for mother is one. (My picture is of last spring's triplets, however, as this years' babies have been unwilling to pose.) Another is the sight of our goldfish, Golda Meir, who is now almost three feet long, who comes up out of the mud and floats in front of the inlet, gulping down her first taste of food since last October.
Everyone has his or her favorite harbinger of spring; the first flock of robins appearing on the lawn; the sight of a bluebird checking out which birdhouse to reside in this year; the delicious sound of spring peepers tuning up in the swamp; the honking of geese overhead as they return from the south.
Of course there are quite a few flower blossoms that foreshadow warm weather. Besides those little crocuses who pushed up through the debris on my terrace several weeks ago, there are quite a lot of woodland wildflowers brave enough to rise and shine very early, sometimes even poking their heads up through the last snows of winter.
You can catch a whiff of the skunk cabbage's pungent smell as early as February. If you're lucky you'll breath in the heady perfume of the trailing arbutus in late March, but unfortunately this delicate wildflower has become so rare that few people can even find it. The hepatica, far more easily spotted, puts forth its blossoms in April, their stems covered in fine hairs, sort of like a fur coat to keep out the cold. Unlike most wildflowers, the hepatica doesn't vanish when winter comes. Its leathery brownish leaves, three-lobed like the club in a deck of cards, stay around right up until the new spring blossoms appear and the new leaves, bright green and shiny, start to unfold.
To me one of the most conspicuous flowers to appear each spring is the coltsfoot. This small yellow blossom pops up along the sandy roadsides early in April. If you see it only from a car window, you might easily mistake it for a common dandelion. Look carefully, however, and you'll discover that even though the golden shaggy head is very similar to a dandelion, it is unaccompanied by the usual jagged green leaves. In fact, it appears to have no foliage at all.
Why is this early bloomer called coltsfoot? Does it grow in horse paddocks? Was it a cure for hoof and mouth disease back in the days of our ancestors? With all the characteristics of a parasite (no leaves and a scaly anemic stem that couldn't possibly produce enough chlorophyll to support the blossom) could it derive its food from horse droppings?
I might never have found the answer had we not asked the town for its road sweepings several years ago to fill a washout on the road below our pond.. Salty sand seems an inhospitable environment for anything except hermit crabs to grow in, but that summer I noticed it was supporting a large cluster of unfamiliar leaves. The following spring I found dozens of golden coltsfoot flowers blooming in the same spot. Sure enough, when I looked up coltsfoot in the garden encyclopedia (strangely enough, it is rarely included in wildflower books), there was not only a picture of the dandelion-like blossom, but another of its leaf. According to the book, the name comes from the fact that the leaf resembles a colt's foot. Its shape looks more like a rough-cut arrowhead to me, but obviously I'm in the minority. Other names for coltsfoot include horse hoof, foal's wort and bull's foot.
The large green leaves appear long after the flowers have disappeared. Each is coated on the underside with white down. (A goldfinch once told me that this soft fluff is the ultimate in nest-lining material, but she also admitted that getting a sufficient amount to line a nest takes a lot of time and effort.)
Coltsfoot's botanical name is Tussilago farfara from the Latin tussis meaning cough. The plant was brought to America by early settlers to be used as a remedy for coughs and other respiratory ailments. The leaves were collected in small bunches and dried, then added to a variety of tonics. They were also smoked as tobacco by asthmatic sufferers. Why someone already having difficulty breathing would want to smoke even an herbal cigarette to find relief is a mystery more puzzling than the name coltsfoot.
Do you have a special harbinger of spring I didn't mention, besides the smell of the good earth warming up?
