It is amazing how quickly a couple of nice days can bring us into full-on spring. Forsythia is blooming everywhere. The hyacinths popped open over night.

Every few years it is necessary to replenish the hyacinth bulbs. They become weaker every year. I dose them with a healthy amount of bulb tone but they still have fewer florets on each stalk every year. I am particularly fond of the Gypsy variety. It is an orange/salmon and really stands out in the blue flowering vinca. Both the scilla and puskinia bloomed on Tuesday.

I was pleased to see the daffodils at the roundabout. I cannot recall them there last year. Hopefully, they will fill in over the years. Mary Larsen’s at Beetlebung Corner are worth a trip up-Island. I just asked Danny if he remembers what year she planted them.

Last week I needed some information about the purple blooming weed at the M.V. Savings Bank. Judy McChesney left a phone message, “Dead Red Nettle.” Thanks, Judy. I thought it may have been a mint cousin, what with its square stem. The honeybees adore it. I looked it up on the Google and saw it was the Brooklyn Botanical Garden weed of the month. Love that! Bet they could get a couple decades worth of material at my place. A couple folks guessed Ajuga. Given the sketchy information from me, that was a good choice. Ajuga is another beautiful weed but it tends to escape the flower beds and run amok all over the lawn.

I don’t care about weeds in my lawn. Good thing. For years I let the children blow dandelions all over the place.

Three or four years ago, I tried planting cotton. I started it in the greenhouse and lovingly tended to it all summer. It was a beautiful plant but produced nary a bol. At the same time I seeded some woad. It was advertised as a dye plant. You must see my thought pattern. I planned to dye my cotton crop.

At any rate, the woad took off. It has seeded everywhere. The leaves are a subtle blue green and it makes an airy yellow flower. How I wish I had put it into a meadow with some blue lupines. Live and rarely learn is my motto.

Also, I am overrun with wormwood. I believe I planted it back in the day. Oops! This is artemisia absinthium from which the illegal (here) alcoholic beverage is made. Remember absinthe in Of Human Bondage? It is a powerful anti-parasitic but if the taste is similar to the smell — yuck.

Since it is Good Friday, indulge me as I quote from my old Methodist hymnal. Edward Perronet wrote in the mid-1700s, All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name — third verse. “Sinners, whose love can ne’er forget the wormwood and the gall — Go spread your trophies at his feet — and crown him Lord of all.”

Happy Easter to all.

In my perfect world I would end with that but I made the mistake of watching the news. The whole chemical attack in Syria is sketchy. How could Putin not have known? It was most likely a test for Trump. This is the guy who said he wouldn’t let our enemies know what he would do but told Russia he was about to bomb the airfield. None of the runways were disabled. In fact, Assad used them within 36 hours.

Trump was supposedly moved by the images of poisoned children. I’m not saying the whole thing was not horrific, but children have been dying over there for five years. Yet he won’t let them come here. Chemicals, barrel bombs, starvation, rape, torture — all are weapons of war which result in dead people. I wish I had a solution and certainly do not know what is really going on behind the scene, but it looks like a distraction to me. He wants to show he really isn’t involved with Putin. I’m starting to get the “are we in another Cuban missile crisis” feeling and do not like it.