A bright sunny Valentine's Day is perfect for windflowers (tenpetal anemones), whose blooms are closed in cloudy weather. The white and occasionally blue or pink flowers decorate open grassy patches and lawns in shallow soil. Windflowers won't grow inside forest, so they're not easily found in the ravine. But I know some places to look. I wonder why the colors are patchy, only white flowers here but mixed with blue ones there? Some of the ravine's other early-blooming plants such as trout lilies, spiderlilies, and violets are either white or blue, or both. Are they "experimenting" with the best color for attracting early-spring insects?

Two weeks hence blooming windflowers will peak. When folks start to cut grass, the seeds are already dispersing -- fortunately. Windflowers join spring beauties and Missouri violets but follow southern plains trout lilies as harbingers of earliest spring. Spring beauties are an eastern plant near their western edge of range in the ravine. I know of only one population and one other in a cemetery, both gradually being extirpated by mowing. Why can't folks leave these beautiful natives alone until they finish reproducing? In cemeteries they are an especially fitting reminder of life's cycles.