Pasque Flower

It was a spring morning that turned into a summer afternoon, and suddenly it seemed like everybody everywhere stopped what they were doing and went outside. Me, I was on my way to a meeting downtown, but I stopped for just a few minutes to enjoy the new blooms at the Arboretum.

There are bright colors everywhere. Yellow daffodils line the paths. Pink pansies present their lovely smiling faces in the kaleidoscope at the children's garden. Lenten roses bloom in lavender-mauve in the shadow of the Witness Tree. And in the pollinator garden, what did I spy but the very first pink bloom of pasque flower.

The stems and leaves of this flower are adorably soft and fuzzy, very touchable. And when the flowers finally go to seed, they are just amazing, all spiky like those Truffula trees Dr. Seuss's Lorax was so intent on saving. (See exhibit A and exhibit B; I'm partial to them covered in raindrops, as you may have noticed.)

But this is how the flower appeared on this particular spring-into-summer day. It was freshly born, and there it stood, without a spot or a mark on it, upright and proud against a blue-blue Pennsylvania sky: pretty in pink.

The soundtrack: the Psychedelic Furs, with Pretty in Pink.