The Crocus: Pioneer in the Spring Parade

On a sunny walk in Merion Station only two days ago, a small splash of purple on a neighbor’s front lawn grabbed my attention and shook me to my core: crocus flowers! In full bloom! A whole lawn loaded with them. What a sight for sore wintry eyes.

And you know what that means: after a remarkably cold and surprisingly snowy winter, spring is here.

Spring is an elegantly orchestrated parade of unfolding events: plants opening their buds and then flowering and leafing out, birds arriving from faraway places like the Bahamas and the Amazon, even Tierra del Fuego. Hibernating animals-- everything from bees to bats, reptiles and amphibians-- crawling out of their hiding places to search for food and mates.

And two plants signal that the parade has started. One is the crocus, not native to Wild Philly, but instead a hugely welcome cultivar on our lawns and yards. As you can imagine, it’s a high-risk business being a crocus, as it is still only February, and the weather could turn on a dime tomorrow, and freezing rain, snow, hail, and low temperatures could all doom the dainty petals that bravely unfold in the sunlight.

But it's a high-reward strategy too, one that evolved in the plant’s native habitats of southern Europe and central Asia. When insects awaken from their long winter’s nap, they are going to need food immediately, and the crocus evolved to be the very first plant that wild bees and other pollinators see when they emerge for the new season. So on those warm late winter days when the sun is shining and bees might be emerging, the crocus is literally the only game in town.

The strategy has worked well enough that crocuses (or croci, as crossword puzzles like to remind us) over hundreds of thousands of years have been blooming this early-- their payoff is the fierce loyalty of the newly emergent pollinators feasting on pollen and nectar. 

So the early bird does get the worm: the early crocus gets pollinated.

The lawn where my crocus was blooming was on a small rise that was south-facing, so this patch of grass was getting full sunlight sooner. So this might be among the earliest of what are already pioneer flowers. (And yes, snowdrops are also in bloom now too.)

I mentioned at the top that there were two flowers that signaled spring to me. Besides the crocus, skunk cabbage is the other, blooming in wet places in early spring, and the subject of next week’s blog post.

And in later posts we’ll wade into how climate change is complicating, even upending, the parade.  

But for now, the wildflower parade has started, led by the crocus. Happy Spring!