Photography: Early Spring

This place: once was, someone's home. Grapevine invasive takes over planted daffodils where an old stone house is surrounded by the woods, dirt road now a mere path, almost absolved. Unshown: the trash pile of glass, metal and tools they left behind for others to wonder of their shadows. But their daffodils remain!

This was, a neighbor. Forsythia buffering. Unnoticeable here, a buckling middle; house about to split in two.

I took these photos recently on a walk in the woods to check out what flora had peeked out of their resting places thus far. It is amazing to see something like Skunk Cabbage (the last picture) manifesting its purple and greens in a huge colony on a flooded creek overgrown with wild rose and young unflowering trees. All of this energy, resting in a root--suddenly puts forth this divine design and expresses its language in it's own 'withy windle' of sorts. This is that plant's language. Spelling it out for us. Skunk cabbage is hard to miss- an early Spring plant that doesn't have many neighbors in its place in the browns and blacks of the wintered woods. Chickweed, dandelions, docks, garlic mustard, dead nettle, daffodils planted old by abandoned homesteads, forsythia were all present.

The top photos are of forsythia. I loved this plant growing up, but so many people trimmed it into boxes that this image was what i always thought it was supposed to look like. Oh, our square impositions on the seemingly uncontrollable. These were growing next to an old homestead alongside the daffodils. I think they are much more beautiful wild.

I was hiking at the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship, a big bit of conservation land, an organic farm and educational center. It is a nice green space on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountain chain. It is full of own farm sites in the middle of hardwood forests because the land has become reclaimed.