Artist, Author, Designer

Well, it’s been off-and-on warmish for a month, toward twilight the peepers tune up alongside the stream in the valley, and the calendar confirms it – I think spring has come to the Smokies.

It’s sometimes subtle. When I walk onto the porch of my workshop, this is what I see today.

Fields are turning green in the distance, but the trees are just beginning to hint at what they’re about to do, leaf-wise. Sometimes, of course, it’s not so subtle. If I lean across the rail in the first picture and look in the other direction, this is what I see.

There are few things that offer more promise of spring than forsythia, especially when seen against distant mountains.

These forsythia aren’t showing to their absolute best because the light isn’t directly on them. When I walk around back of the workshop, this is the startling sight.

Some people named Eckmann owned this property back in the mid-1970s. They’re the ones who planted the forsythia that we continue to enjoy today. To them and all those other gardeners who over millennia have planted for the future as well as the present, we say thank you. We think it’s about time that we did more of this ourselves, and I’ll be posting news of it here.

Not everything must be planted by human hands, of course. Nature does pretty well on its own much of the time, especially when the weather cooperates. As I walk back up the road, on the way to the house for lunch, the sight’s all subtlety again, with sun streaking through a hillside still mostly gray but with a tantalizing glaze of green around the feet of the still-bare trees. You can almost hear on the slightest of breezes the whisper of a promise of deep green woods to come.

It’ll change every day. Most days I won’t think to photograph it. Today I did. I hope you enjoy along with me seeing spring arrive.

© 2012, Robert Hewitt. All rights reserved.

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