Finally rain. For weeks, the only place there had been moisture was in the marsh and even there, areas that usually catch my boots in the mud were dry. I could not see the footprints of the bear (or is it deer?) that have been digging up and eating the underground skunk cabbage flowers. Not that I could do anything to stop it. A layer of snow that actually sticks around for a while seems like wishful thinking these days.

Masses of skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, appeared one spring, like magic, after we hired a team to remove the barberry from about an acre of the marsh adjacent to the driveway. Of course, it had been there all along, waiting patiently underground or hiding in the barberry’s thorny shrub-cages, but we had not seen it. That was about eight years ago; after the barberry’s removal there have been successive infestations of invasives but also, as with the skunk cabbage, some welcome new sightings of native plants.