This past Saturday (April 19th) I walked the shores of tiny Burmis Lake—it's a stone's throw south of the Burmis Tree, presumed to be Canada's most photographed tree—to see what flowers might have exposed themselves and joined, in bloom, the previously reported early buttercups (R. glaberrimus).
The attached images expose the open-petaled story on the pre-Easter landscape. Adding to the springtime magic, a pair of Barrow's Goldeneyes plied the water, Canada geese were nesting on a sandstone cliff and dozens of tree swallows were overhead.
Many hundreds of early buttercups stole the show, but they're past peak bloom now, and the first wave of prairie crocuses is beginning to color the land. The crocuses, unlike the little buttercups, rise above the surrounding mat of vegetation.
Perry's Townsendia was showing some petals, but still hadn't opened enough to qualify as a bloomer.
I tracked down and shot a single blooming yellowbell (Fritillaria pudica).
A Fish and Wildlife officer spotted me as I, looking suspicious in his eyes, wove through thickets and hugged rock faces. He approached me, confident I was a fisherman trying to elude him, but when my fly rod turned out to be a camera, he had to look elsewhere for violators.
Here at home on Rock Creek, less than 10 km away from the blooming flowers and only slightly higher in elevation, the land's less springy. One snow drift just south of our home is still at least five meters deep.
The Easter Sunday view looks out from the snow-white, serrated-knife-edged Livingstone Range, past the music of Rock Creek and into a greening landscape with herds of deer and elk.
Thank you for the lovely spring bouquet, David! The Oldman remembers fields of crocuses, wildflowers of every kind and the flying flowers - the butterflies - in vacant lots in little towns not that long ago. A flower, once picked, is dead. Beauty, when shared through a camera lens or a walk together, lives.
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