By Patricia Lee Sharpe
A conifer forest doesn’t change much from month to month. The snow falls. The snow melts. Trails get muddy. They dry up. Sometimes the sky beyond is a cheery blue. Dismal gray is also possible. The lichen on rocks is alive, pale green rosettes clinging to pink granite all year round, but a colony of lichen grows so slowly that visible change has to be measured in years. There’s nothing new to note as the days lengthen.
The piñons and junipers that make up our high desert forests at these middling elevations don’t crowd one another. Each needs room to slurp up a decent share of the precipitation that arrives as rain or snow. That means there’s room
for sun-loving plants to make themselves at home.
Last weekend I noticed that tiny ruffles of green are poking through the dry brown tufts that mark where flowers were last summer. By June the hills will be dotted with yellow and purple composites whose names I have never mastered. In June the yucca will be sending up stalks of waxy lily-like flowers, and the prickly pears will be blooming, too. These cactus flowers remind me crocuses. That or demi tasse cups. When the sun shines through their translucent yellow or vermillion petals, they are
ethereally lovely.
It took me a few years to understand how succulents respond to spring. During the winter they tend to look dry and shrunken, as if they are dying if not already done for. Then, suddenly, the cactus pads are plumping up, and the yucca leaves are thickening, too. They have made it through the winter.
Down in Santa Fe the fruit trees are blossoming now, especially the apricots, but spring takes its time in the hills. Ten days ago I was still
picking my way over white crystals for long stretches on the north-facing portions of the trail. By this week the snow had been reduced to splotches here and there. Where it has most recently melted away, the trails are moist or even puddled, but the danger of slipping no longer comes from ice. It’s loose gravel on dry steep slopes that has to be watched out for.
The piñons and junipers that make up our high desert forests at these middling elevations don’t crowd one another. Each needs room to slurp up a decent share of the precipitation that arrives as rain or snow. That means there’s room
Last weekend I noticed that tiny ruffles of green are poking through the dry brown tufts that mark where flowers were last summer. By June the hills will be dotted with yellow and purple composites whose names I have never mastered. In June the yucca will be sending up stalks of waxy lily-like flowers, and the prickly pears will be blooming, too. These cactus flowers remind me crocuses. That or demi tasse cups. When the sun shines through their translucent yellow or vermillion petals, they are
It took me a few years to understand how succulents respond to spring. During the winter they tend to look dry and shrunken, as if they are dying if not already done for. Then, suddenly, the cactus pads are plumping up, and the yucca leaves are thickening, too. They have made it through the winter.
Down in Santa Fe the fruit trees are blossoming now, especially the apricots, but spring takes its time in the hills. Ten days ago I was still
You’d think that this transitional season would make for a pretty boring walk, visually, but that’s far from the case. The charm of incipient spring in these hills is both subtle and dramatic. I found myself stopping repeatedly to study the angular abstractions of criss-crossing piñon branches dead or alive, to appreciate the newly filled out look of yucca or cholla thriving among rocks, to trace the amoeboid shapes of persistent patches of snow.
Above all I basked in the benign sun and reveled in the feel of warm but gusty wind on bare skin. No coat. No gloves. No hat. Maybe that’s the best part of early spring.