ReNe: spring flowers

Though I like plants, I'm not a botanist. I like to look and enjoy but not to name. Still, I've just noticed something really interesting about spring.

With the warming temperatures, the green is coming back. No surprise there. What is a surprise is that, for some species of trees and bushes, it is the flowers that come up first, before the leaves. Maybe this is very common knowledge for people who've grown up in at the temperate latitudes, but since I came from a tropical country, I've always seen plants with leaves on them -- a leafless plant is a dead plant -- and I've always thought that the leaves come first (the plant has to make food after all) and the flowers are seasonal. In the tropics, after a hot stretch, a heavy downpour would then render the air heavy and lush with a floral perfume; I think it's either the raintree or angsana. That was my experience of the flower blooming season.

Therefore, flowers blooming in spring was, to me, has no physical sense. (Spring, to me, was also an intellectual concept till now.) That's the first point. The second point was, I certainly was not expecting the flowers before the leaves. The past week, I've noticed bushes and trees that were literally covered in flowers, which bloom in a matter of days. A few days later, the leaves started to appear. But not all species do this, only some.

The photo really should have been taken a couple of days earlier, but even here, it's obvious that the flowers are in full bloom while the leaves are only starting to unfurl.

A couple of other things I noticed about spring include the wildly fluctuating temperatures and the sunshine. Last week I wrote about how we seem to have skipped past the single digit temperatures and hurtled right into summer-like temperatures; looks like I spoke too soon. This week, the temperatures dropped back into the single digits. Coupled with the winds -- have I mentioned how windy Toronto is? -- it's freezing. And talking about the sunshine; the transition from winter to spring seem to involve a sunlight switch. Suddenly, it was as if the sunlight was switched on. Very strange.