In Anchorage it means that the sun is high enough on the horizon that you can feel its heat and that every day gains five or six minutes of daylight (13 hours and 16 minutes today.) Sun both melts and evaporates snow, ice art forms again at night. Here's what it looked like today near Campbell Airstrip.
Cottonwoods reaching skyward, basking in the sun's warmth,
waking their sweet smelling sticky buds.
Campbell Creek still mostly covered by snow below the bridge.
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The birch sending out its own Morse code messages.
I'm sure it's profound; if I could only read it.
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It's wonderful to experience the reawakening that occurs in your part of the world. Here, it's a longer, gentler stretch. Recently reading Andrea Wulf's book 'The Brother Gardeners' on the commerical pursuits of what became botanical science gave me a look into my immigrant assumptions of these countless small plots of ground we call the English garden.
ReplyDeleteHow did it come to be that we associate gardens with this island? The simple answer is the early observation and cultivation of the plant world brought from the far-flung colonies of emergent empire.
They looked at plants closely rather than sweeping them away with god-praising accolades. Remaining curious, their notes became a science, creating and recreating names and classification systems inexplicably moving to the advent of evolutionary order between garden trees and flowers.
These discoverers pondered these things over beer, tea and coffee houses to understand something at once disorienting and reorienting about our world.
And it started with a simple and personal love of forest plants. Good stuff, looking at things.