were in spectacular bloom, native plants are taking their time. These little blue flowers - squill, I think they're called - aren't native, and the woods beyond them, across the Bronx River, seem to offer the same the grey-brown scene they've offered for months. Not quite...
There's a yellow-greenish glow as some bushes in the understory leaf out. But the tips of many tree branches high overhead are well into spring, too. It's something you can't really see except when a tree, like this red maple, topples but decides not to give up the ghost.
The big surprise came in a somewhat wetter section of the woods: a lush carpet of trout lilies! These are flowers I'd only seen before in the Adirondacks and had assumed rare. No such thing! They bloom across eastern North America from Louisiana to Newfoundland! Confirms that I'm an eastern deciduous forest illiterate, ready to learn more!
