Nature Notes ~ Spring 2024

Bright New Beginnings

Spring is a wonderful, inspiring time for new beginnings. Here's to positive energy and a fresh new start! My heart smiles with anticipation when I think about the smell of soft spring rain, the florescent greens of new ferns and leafed out trees, and young plants beginning to peek out from underneath the fall leaf cover and rich nurturing soil.

Spring shares bright encouragement to be out in nature and soak up the warm sunshine. And there's happiness to be found in digging in the dirt and planting seeds and flowers in the garden. What a magical time of year!

Also with even more inspiration and in anticipation of sharing my new bumblebee painting in the summer edition of Nature Notes, please join me in celebrating World Bee Day on May 20! Hooray for bees, butterflies, and all of our beloved pollinators!

With warm spring greetings, 

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Conservation Corner

Last season, there was an educational event at the local garden center called Beauty and the Bees to teach people about designing gardens and planting flowers to attract and care for our pollinators. The event also shared the importance of bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds to our natural landscapes and ecosystems. So let's create beauty all around with pretty wildflowers to help pollinators thrive!

To share encouragement for planting native flower seeds and plants, here are some great resources. One is the book, 100 Plants to Feed the Bees from the Xerces Society, an amazing organization that promotes invertebrate conservation. Here's a link to the book on their website.

Contact your local land trust or conservation organization for additional guidance, as well as your county open space staff or a nearby university extension office. These folks will have lists of native plants that are best suited for your region/ecosystem and ideas about where to purchase them. The natives will need less maintenance and are a perfect fit for the amount of rainfall, soil make-up, and seasonal temperatures in your area. Easy, pretty AND good for our pollinators! Win win!

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Early Spring Hike in the Woods

I'm so looking forward to crisp spring hikes! It's still cool enough to be comfortable and shed some of our layers as we get going and warm up on the trail. Plus it's a wonderful opportunity to look for those brave flowers in the woods and grasslands that only bloom in early spring, like this pretty pasque flower, a wild crocus that grows on hillsides and in meadows here in Colorado. Let's all get out and enjoy the pretty season!

"The Earth laughs in flowers."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Wishing you a beautiful spring, dear friends of nature!