April 6th NO REGRETS
As I walk along the roadside looking hopefully for more signs of spring among the lingering snowbanks and leaf litter, I notice that two of my neighbors still have their sap buckets out; one fellow with steam pouring out of his sugar shack. I wonder if I haven't perhaps pulled my taps to soon? But no, I'm quite content with the amount of the syrup I've made and am ready to get on with other things. There'll be plenty of sap to boil next year.

April 8th NO SNOW
Three days of dry windy weather have helped to melt whatever snow was still hidden in the woods and piled up along the roadsides. Even the big ice chunks down along the creek have disappeared. Driving along, I realized that I actually miss the snow. Everything looks so strange, naked and vulnerable without its protective blanket.

April 9th NEW SHOOTS
In the garden and about the yard, the day lily shoots and tulips are up as well as the iris and rhubarb. These are easy to recognize, and of course they are right where I planted them in the first place, so it's not as much of a guessing game as it is with their wild counterparts.

But these too, the unidentifiable green shoots down at the creek, are also beginning to take shape and are now unmistakable. Among the fragile grasses, fiddleheads and matted bluet leaves, the false hellebore stands out like a giant among dwarfs. Often mistaken from a distance for skunk cabbage, perhaps because of its huge size and creekside manner, the false hellebore looks in fact nothing at all like skunk cabbage.

False hellebore (Veratrum virde) is a member of the lily family, and like most members of the lily family its leaves are parallel veined, not at all cabbage like. The false hellebore will eventually grow to a height of up to eight feet tall including its flower stalk, which is a couple feet itself. The shoots pictured here are about a foot tall, and grew that tall in a little over a week's time. It's a fast grower and will soon crowd the creek bank. But for now I can still make my way in between them, being careful not to step on the wild oats or anemones sprouting up in between. All parts of this plant are poisonous if eaten, so it is important not to confuse it with the skunk cabbage.

Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) belongs to an entirely different family, the arum family, and is related to jack-in-the-pulpit and other plants with the strange flower arrangement of a spike (spadix) covered with a hood (spathe). Skunk cabbage's hooded flower spike pokes its fat round head out of the snow in February or March. Once pollinated, the cabbage-like leaves appear and grow to be quite large by the time the hellebore shoots come up. Skunk cabbage never attains the height of the hellebore, however. The whole plant has a skunk-like odor, but even so, it is said to be edible, the offensive odor being washed away in a couple of changes of cooking water. This is one wild food I've never tried.