Before the Leaves Appear

There was once a carpet of satiny dark purple crocuses beneath the peeling copper-brown trunk of a paperbark maple tree in our front yard. Others would appear in the backyard each year in early spring. Inspired, I bought hundreds more bulbs from a local company one December, rescued them from the mailbox before they could freeze (much easier to do in Connecticut than more northern places), and planted them in the backyard.

The local population of chipmunks and squirrels, possibly enlarged by a mast season of oak acorns, decimated my new plantings and then kept going to take out a significant proportion of the preexisting crop. Theirs was a targeted attack. Where there should have been flowers, there were gaping bulb-sized holes, like dark, bloodless bullet wounds, in the damp spring earth.

I was both horrified and amazed. Our local four-legged friends regularly go after plants in our yard. I can't grow tulips, for example. I learned not to try while playing an annual game of find-the-tulip in the yard. Either a previous owner or a neighbor had planted tulips, and their bulbs—dug up, moved, and then forgotten by squirrels—would grow tall and green in random spots around the garden. There would be one among the daffodils one year and another behind the holly hedge another. Every single year, just as the blooms opened, a deer (I think) would find them, and chew off their heads, as if the colorful blossoms were big eat-me beacons.

The crocus had always been safe, until that one fateful year I got greedy and wanted more.

Fortunately, they didn't get them all. There are fewer now than there once were, but I have adjusted my expectations. I delight in the blooms as individuals rather than great colonies of color.

I've taken pictures of them over the years, but there's only so much variety one can get with photos taken from above and without consideration of ambient light conditions. So this spring, I got serious, applying what I had learned from tulips-in-the-window photography, like using the right angle to see the sunlight diffuse through the flower petals, plus some new tricks, like the use of a simple circular diffuser I ordered online to soften the strong spring sunlight that would angle across the yard.

Some days the clouds themselves would act as a natural diffuser and conditions one might label as "dreary" became a photographic opportunity. A trio of deer posed themselves beneath an overcast sky, and I got photos that needed no adjustments. I fiddled with my camera's aperture through it all, to play with different levels of bokeh and depth.

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