Finding the first flowers in spring makes me happy

The first flowers of the year: snowdrops in a garden in Ottawa.

The long winter in Ottawa finally ends when I see my first flower, and therefore I was excited this week when I did find the first snowdrops. Like so many inhabitants in North America, these lovely small white flowers are also immigrants. These small bulbs are native to Europe and the Middle East, a vast region from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus and Iran. 

Although you often find them in gardens, some snowdrop species are threatened in their wild habitats due to habitat destruction, illegal collecting, and climate change. It seems that too many snowdrops followed the fate of the one in the short story by Hans Christian Andersen that follows a snowdrop from a bulb striving toward the light to end as a picked flower placed in a book of poetry. So now, collecting bulbs from the wild is illegal in most countries.

I remember that I wrote about snowdrops two years ago; it was the last year that I lived in Stockholm. The electronic sketch is still on my smartphone, and I will add it here, but I doubt if you can read my scribbles. The date must be readable: March 12, indicating that the winter in Stockholm ends a month earlier than in Ottawa.

Alexnote, March 12, 2020

Unlike the previous winter, I haven’t been out much these months, and I feel that I don’t walk enough. My smartphone thinks so too. It seems to know more about me than I do myself since it counts all the steps I take each day; it is an easy job for my phone since I stay inside too often. It also tells me that I walked on average much less than last year.

So as a small step to improve my habits, I recently joined a walking group, and the plan is to walk one morning a week in or around Ottawa. My step count may not have improved much from the three times I found the time to join them, but I made new friends and saw parts of this city that I had not yet visited. 

A walk with this group made me find the first snowdrops. We had started at Hog’s Back, an impressive spot of foaming white water and rock cliffs in a city park setting, especially for a Dutchman that is used to only slowly moving surface water. In this short video, you see the Hogs Back water-control dam in the background. The site is part of the Rideau Canal water control dam, a nearly 200 years old and 202-kilometer long waterway that links Lake Ontario at Kingston with the Ottawa River.

The quiet side of the dam

This was the week of the IPCC report. I wrote about it last Monday (you can read it here if you missed it). But it was also the subject of quite a few podcasts I made this week. For instance, this podcast on “Then things you can do about climate change,” or this one: “All you need to know about the IPCC report.”

That’s it for today, and just one more photo: this is the beautiful path we followed along the river during the walk that led to my first flower sighting of the year in Ottawa.

A beautiful walk along the river

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I write these newsletters, share my photos, do interviews, make podcasts about the environment, and share my travels because I believe that together we can do better on this beautiful but fragile planet.

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