Jumpy weather has distracted me from my usual preoccupation with spring wildflowers. I found myself walking in the woods this week wondering if I’d missed the early bloomers, especially the delightful Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria). I hurried down the path and was relieved to see them flapping in the breeze. In the same genus as those old-fashioned garden favorites, bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis), Dutchman’s breeches bloom and fade quickly. I recycled my poem to celebrate their sighting.

Fed up with winter
and lines of dingy laundry
drying by the smoky hearth,
the Dutchman's wife
hangs her husband's breeches
in cloud-strewn April sun
where billowing white flags
announce to all her neighbors
that spring has come.
—ACF