Colorado Nature Narratives

Common Name – Pasque Flower
Latin Name – Pulsatilla patens
Family – Buttercup (Ranunculaceae)

On March 31, I hiked slowly along the trails of Bear Creek Nature Center hoping to find a Pasque Flower in bloom. I didn’t see any sign of the flowers in their usual location along the edges of a scrub oak thicket. Just as I was beginning to think that maybe I wouldn’t find one, I found two! The fragile-looking purple flower is actually quite hardy and very well-adapted to be one of Spring’s first wildflowers. It is cloaked with tiny silky hairs that help to insulate it from the cold winds and freezing temperatures of late March and early April. The flower is named “Pasque” because it blooms during the Easter (Paschal) season.

My favorite nature writer Ann Zwinger describes the Pasque Flower as,
“where there was snow last week, there is today a delicate Pasque Flower, so pale as to seem formed of snow crystals.”

While hiking last weekend after a fresh snowfall, I was treated to one of Nature’s transitory works of art. The emerging sun had created an unusual shadow on the sparkly snow that was shaped like a ginkgo leaf. The ephemeral blue shadow reminded me of one of my favorite quotes by Marcel Proust:

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes
but in having new eyes.

Snow Shadow Ginkgo

In 1869, William Jackson Palmer was inspired by the beauty of the Pikes Peak Region to build a city that would be worthy of its spectacular location. The following excerpt from Palmer’s August, 1869, letter describes his vision of the site for Colorado Springs, the city he founded two years later. Palmer’s words from 141 years ago still ring true and encourage me to join with others in our city to find ways to regain and continue his vision.

They could find nothing more attractive, perhaps,

In the whole of the Rocky Mountains.

Here where the air is fraught with health and vigor,

And where life would be poetry.

An idyll of blue sky… fantastic rock…

High mountains and distant view,

Of the kind that gives wing to the imagination.

View that gives wing to the imagination

In rereading Beyond the Aspen Grove by naturalist and author Ann Zwinger, I found passages to savor on every single page. On this snowy winter morning, Ann’s words paint a picture of the bright colors of summer and remind me to enjoy winter’s beauty, too.

This land is a place of all seasons, for even in winter there is the promise of spring, and in spring, the foretaste of summer. The white of snow becomes the white of summer clouds, the resonant green of spruce becomes the green head of drake mallard; the gray of rock and lichen endures in the gray of lowering winter skies; the same orange-red of Indian paintbrush bars the blackbird’s wing and stains the western tanager’s head. Here part of each season is contained in every other.