The Greens of Spring

Well, we were poking along, making our merry way into an earlier than usual spring.....and it just suddenly burst forth onto the land.  In a matter of two days the landscape has totally transformed itself, and I have never--in over 30 years in Maine--seen it happen this quickly.  POOF!!!! It was almost as if all the plants and trees received the same e-mail from Mother Nature: "It's TIME."

One aspect of it has not changed, however: the greens of spring are as vibrant and fresh as they have always been.  The chloroplasts in the leaves are present and beginning to do their assigned task of performing photosynthesis, but the other parts of the leaves haven't had any time to mature, so the leaves are as thin and fragile to the touch as a latex membrane, like that of a surgical glove, almost not there, and very vulnerable.  As the days pass the leaves will firm up and in a month or so they will have the deeper and cooler greens of summer in place. For reasons I don't fully comprehend myself, I refer to these as 'iron greens'; they just seem hard and inpenetrable in comparison to the tender warm greens of spring.