What's blooming.

Phenology is the study of when things happen. When the first bee shows up. When the redbud blooms. When the goldenrod finally goes. Most of what an attentive person knows about a place comes from noticing the order in which things appear — and from noticing when that order shifts.

These notes track what's blooming, what's flying, what's calling, what's eating what. They are time-stamped. They are local to wherever the editor was standing when they wrote them, which is mostly the eastern temperate zone of the United States, but the practice is portable to any patch anywhere.

The order is starting to shift. That part is real. We try to write that down too — not as alarm, but as record. Someone needs to keep track of the small changes, and a backyard is as good a place as any to start.