After most of a lifetime in Montana, May is spring for me, even though in Kentucky it arrives much earlier. For a Montana native, March, even with green grass or April, with daytime temperatures that can get into the 80s isn't spring. Spring comes in May.

There are other things that seem "wrong" about spring in Kentucky. The first springtime flowers you notice here along the rural roadsides are daffodils. Daffodils are supposed to be flower garden flowers, though here they are garden flowers simply gone wild.

Then there are the flowering trees, beginning with the redbuds. They can be incredibly georgous, a bank of soft raspberry parfait color banked against dark treetrunks with trees and underbrush just starting to leaf out.


The first of the true wildflowers are the woods violets. They hug the ground along fencerows and creeks and in the forested hills, deep purple against the glossy green leaves, sometimes difficult to see against the dark ground of fall leaves. They are lovely and delicate, a flower that could not survive the harsh winters of Montana.

But I miss the early harbingers of spring in Montana. First, the brilliant yellow of the first buttercups, sometimes even edging a late snowbank. As a child, the buttercups arrived on the hill behind the cabin, announcing that winter would not, in fact, last forever and the overshoes, heavy coats, gloves and scarves could soon be put away.

The buttercups were followed soon by the "shooting stars" that needed warmer weather and drier ground, brilliant sparks against still nearly barren ground.

There were no wild flowering trees. Occasionally you would see apple or crabapple trees in someone’s back yard but in the hills, while plum thickets and chokecherry bushes could get as high as 12 to 15 feet, they were not trees. They flowered only briefly, white drifts of blossoms looking like late snow along the branches.

A hard frost or late spring snowstorm could wipe out a season’s berry crop as well as any garden planted by enthusiastic but overly optimistic gardeners. Early June was considered "usually safe" by most long time residents. A 3-day blizzard with 6-foot snowdrifts in late May were not uncommon and in my 30-plus years of living there, I have been snowed on in every month except August.

Spring in Kentucky is earlier and a much gentler season, with lush greenery following closely after the enthusiastic flushes of flowers and blossoming trees, covering rounded hills and obscuring the landscape. Rain and fog softens the colors and the landscape even into the heat of summer, the brilliant greens you see only in early spring in the west continuing into the fall in Kentucky.