Spring Ephemerals
Spring Beauty, a Spring Ephemeral, with Spiderwort in the background at Middle Fork Barrens.
On a recent trip to the Middle Fork Barrens, I mentioned to a friend that there were lots of “spring ephemerals,” and got the retort “that’s a big word.”
It does fee like a heavy word for tiny flowers.
It’s the phrase used by botanists and biologists: “Spring ephemerals are perennials that emerge early in the spring and then grow, reproduce, and disappear from the surface of the forest floor in just a few short weeks” (Nicki Cagle, Duke University).
“Ephemeral” also captures well the feeling of early spring flowers— the ones that come up before everything is green, looking small and fragile, all alone, and then disappear. There’s something tender, as in raw and almost sore, about early spring. Cold, unpredictable and stormy, April is the cruelest month (except in the south where it’s March). Anyone who has strewn bedsheets over their yard knows this. Spring is the time of seeds attempting to germinate. It’s the time ravenous creatures try to raise kits or fledglings. Its the time of frog spawn and insect hatching. All that promise and all that potential sent out like a small explosion.
As Annie Dillard famously noted, nature is profligate, almost wasteful. Of the frog eggs hatching, only a a few tadpoles will become mature frogs. Same for insect eggs. If we want to take an honest look, not all the bunnies, fox kits, titmouse fledglings, and fawns will survive either. Nature is wasteful: there’s an over abundance in order to accommodate the rate of loss. Spring is the season of renewal, but it comes with fraught vulnerability. Giving birth is dangerous, young need protection. Spring, possibly more than fall, is the storing up against winter, against lean times, against loss.
Ink sketch of plantains and spring emphemerals at Middle Fork Barrens
In the realm off poetry and art, it’s almost a cliché, the ‘bitter spring’ where mourning contrasts spring life against personal experiences of death or loss. And yet, spring is always forecasting loss, always hedging bets of plenty against attrition. Without that, it has no power, no meaning, no sharpness to make the sweet less empty. It is bubble gum flavoring and saccharine greeting cards. There is something terrible and foolishly hopeful about throwing all that life, delicate and new, into the face of death and age and time. It is because of this fragile and almost painful type of hope that we experience it so profoundly.
Notes:
ephemeral: adjective
lasting for a very short time: fashions are ephemeral.
-(chiefly of plants) having a very short life cycle: chickweed is an ephemeral weed, producing several generations in one season.
(New Oxford American Dictionary via Apple)
Nicki Cagle, Vernal, Ephemeral, Spring Beauty by Any Other Name by Sophie Cox, Duke Research Blog, April 2022
https://researchblog.duke.edu/2022/04/05/vernal-ephemeral-spring-beauty-by-any-other-name/
April is the cruelest month from T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
Anne Dillard:
“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek