And then there was one...

The sole survivor of the night of the marauding squirrels/deers/gophers has bloomed:


That's it for my tulips this year. It stands, forlorn and alone, a profile in courage.

It's a beautiful day today, though, one of several unseasonably warm ones we've had lately. Spring usually isn't quite springlike here, not exactly--that old saw that there are two seasons in New England, winter and the Fourth of July, isn't so very far from the truth. Usually it goes from snow to rain to brown crud/mud and then, after a brief burst, right into the short hot summer.

But this year spring has been early and, so far, it's been long. The forsythia have been fully in bloom for more weeks than I can ever remember previously. And they're still going strong, although this photo doesn't nearly do justice to their intensity, which is the very essence of yellow:


Nothing is so beautiful as spring --
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

----from "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins