Foothills Land Conservancy recently completed a conservation easement on 100 acres near Cane Creek in Anderson County, Tenn.  Shelby Lyn Sanders/ Foothills Land Conservancy

Generations have crisscrossed the expansive pastures near Cane Creek in Anderson County

Virginia beauty (Claytonia virginica) blooming in the woods reminds us winter is spinning away.  Shelby Lyn Sanders

First probing plants and flowers are a sign that winter always ends

There are few who would count winter as their favored time of year, and it is true that one must look harder to find the beauty in a landscape that by all accounts appears forlorn and void of life. But with about a month until the calendar tells us that it is officially spring, winter’s grip is yielding to renewal. It is a time of year that quickens the heartbeat of every naturalist.

The calls of golden-crowned kinglets begin to intermingle with those of the spring peepers, a frog so tiny that it is hard to imagine them capable of such emphatic emissions of sound, and last year’s marcescent American beech leaves preside over persistent, unfurling green lives that would be missed were it not for a careful eye and a curious heart.

The wait has been long, but worth it. With the first sighting of a blooming Virginia spring beauty, the ephemeral wildflower season begins, marking the start of another growing season, another months-long love story spent in awe of nature until the last asters of fall have gone to seed. 

For every thing there is a season, and for lovers of the wild, that season is all of them.

 A bloodroot (Sangiuinaria canadensis) bloom is seen here in Norris Dam State Park on Feb. 19.  John Johnson

A view across the Holston River toward Sleeping Lady in the distance.  Foothills Land Conservancy

Jefferson County views and values protected with Foothills Land Conservancy easement

Shelby Lyn Sanders is a field biologist with Foothills Land Conservancy. 

JEFFERSON CITY — Can you see the Sleeping Lady?

We are standing on the back porch of the historic Isaac McBee House, built in 1850, and I follow Jack Kramer’s gaze across the back lawn, over McBee Island flanked by the cold March waters of the Holston River, and to the mountains in the distance.

“She’s easier to see this time of year,” he says, because those distant hills are unobscured by the foliage of trees still nakedly waiting for spring. Indeed, I can see her — she lies with her head to the west and her toes stretched out to the east, the hills forming the rise and fall of her body.