As always, I figure I’ll start seeing the first blooms about 7-10 days after they show up in your area, Dawn.

I’ve been checking a couple of patches of jonquils that always get mowed, looking for the first sign of them popping up. I want to try and get them moved so they aren’t at risk and can stand a chance of blooming next year.

I haven’t noticed a lot of budding on the the trees and shrubs, but I can’t say I really want them to, yet.

I don't even have weeds blooming yet. Though I do need to go pull some lamium up.
I've had coral honeysuckle sitting with buds since December, only awaiting about a week of warmth to open.

Not a think, actually, but we are warming up now. If I remember the pattern, your visuals means my visuals are 2 to 3 weeks coming.

Half of our yard (and field) is green. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what grass/weeds they are. I've noticed an occasional dandelion all winter, though.

I did notice that my coral honeysuckle is green. Does it stay green during the winter? It also appears to have grown, which I'm happy about.

Today is a holiday with many names. But it is often celebrated (in some areas) as the precursor to spring. Time to start seed, baby lambs are born, and so on.

Coral honeysuckle in my zone is semi-evergreen (about half the leaves it would have in the growing season).

My pansies are surviving, though a little worse for wear with the wind and low temps. That's it, I didn't even notice weeds blooming Thursday when I was out.

What? It's still winter here. While I'm happy for these few warmer days coming back, looks like it's back to low 40s and 20s at night after that. Works for me. So like the others nearer my neck of the woods, nothing at all.

Robert, My daffs have a little foliage up, but only a couple of inches. They don't seem to be in much of a hurry. Honestly, as wet as we have been since September, it wouldn't have surprised me if they had rotted away as they are in the worst sort of clay. I amended that clay before I planted those bulbs about 20 years ago but haven't done anything to it since then.

dbarron, As far north as you are, it would surprise me if you were seeing much plant activity yet. My coral honeysuckle hasn't really suffered too much this winter. I think it bloomed in December, made good new growth in early January when we were warm, but then most of the green foliage turned purplish after we dropped into the teens repeatedly at night during the last half of January .

Bon, I think that is how it usually goes. Our weather is so bizarre here some winters that nothing would surprise me. Someone in one of our Oklahoma gardening FB groups posted a photo of a daffodil in bloom yesterday. I think it was someone who lives in central or SW OK. That daff in bloom this early did surprise me a bit.

Jennifer, Here at our house the coral honeysuckle stays mostly green, but will suffer a little bit of freeze damage occasionally. However, it almost immediately starts putting out new leaf buds after the current ones freeze. It is pretty cold-tolerant. Yours should be growing so I'm glad to hear that it is. I don't remember how long you've had the current plant, but like most perennials, new coral honeysuckle transplants usually sleep the first year, creep the second year and leap the third year.

Nancy, Well technically it still is winter here and the cold will come back, but the plants don't care and are blooming anyway. In some ways it is odd---we were in the teens at least two nights last week---but then these are plants that have good tolerance of cold. One thing I like about dianthus is that in our garden, as long as it is in a well-draining raised bed, it is both cold tolerant and heat tolerant and goes through bloom cycles pretty much year-round.

We always have bees out on any warm day in winter here, so seeing them out is something I'm used to. Now, when the wasps start flying in winter, that's when you really notice, and we had them out on January's warm days so I expect we'll have them out today and over the next few days before the cold blast arrives on Thursday.

I am surprised that the nights with lows in the upper teens didn't kill all the Laura Bush petunia plants that had sprouted. The same is true of the chamomile plants---there are plenty of them that are 4-6" tall and wanting to bloom. Silly things. It is too early, but with the roller coaster weather they've apparently had enough heat to make them "think" it is spring....not that I think that plants actually think or anything.

Dawn

I'm confused. I was going to order Black Heddewigii dianthus and then there was a discussion that carnations don't grow well here. Dawn are your dianthus not carnations? Are carnations just one cultivar of dianthus?

The typical carnations don't like our climate much. But there are lots of dianthus and some flourish here. Yes, carnations are just one species, D. carophyllus.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Dawn is talking about D. barbatus (sweet williams). I could be way off ;) Even though typically sold as annuals or biennials, in Chelsea, clumps would typically last me 3-5 years. With year 3 or 4 being the best performance.

This particular coral honeysuckle was only planted last spring. I picked up a plant at my very first SF, but didn't plant it soon enough and killed it. I'm sorry.

Honestly, I haven't looked much at the garden areas. I see herbs still green and garlic (that I didn't plant last fall. I dunno.) And weeds.

I think that my dianthus plants are Dianthus chinensis, commonly sold as cool-season flowering annuals, although for me they are short-lived perennials that tend to last roughly 3-5 years. While their bloom period is most heavy in springtime, they will go in and out of bloom year-round most years. I think I lost all of mine that I had at that time in the drought of 2011, or if not that year, then in the subsequent drought years of 2012, 2013 and 2014. I know I replanted at some point, only to lose them in 2015 when our rain was roughly 200% of normal (almost 80" versus the usual 36-38"). I replanted again, and the ones in bloom now are those. I may have added more last year to fill in that border. They normally are not fond of wet clay soil but will live and perform well if grown in well-amended clay in raised beds. What I call dianthus are what the older gardening ladies called China Pinks when I was a kid. They are available in much more resilient hybrid forms now and a wider range of colors. I just love them. There's not a lot that will give us bloom in almost every month of the year here.

I haven't had as much luck with Sweet Williams, which are Dianthus barbatus. Those are the ones the older gardening ladies called Sweet Williams (obviously) when I was a kid, although to me back then, they just looked like a taller version of China Pinks. They just do not seem as tolerant of our heat. And, carnations? Those are Dianthus carophyllus and I don't grow them. Their attitude to our climate seems to scream "no how, no way". They hate it here. They hate our clay. They hate our heavy rainfall. They hate our heat. These are what the old gardening ladies called clove pinks when I was a kid, and they bloomed really well in zone 8 Texas when I was a child, but they were strictly winter/early spring bloomers.

Now, just mentioning the old gardening ladies' names for all the different kinds of dianthus makes me nostalgic for the old gardening women of my youth (the 1960s). They wore what were commonly referred to as house dresses back then, usually made of cotton, and often in floral prints. They wore sensible broad-brimmed hats to protect themselves from the sun, sunglasses, and always wore gardening gloves to keep their nails nice and their hands clean and not cut up and shredded like my hands are half the time. Some of the older ones even wore sun bonnets. (I think I'd wear a sunbonnet now if I had one.) They wore practical low-heeled, rubber-soled shoes that were strongly utilitarian and strongly in contrast to the high heels that ladies wore the rest of the time. Athletic shoes were not a thing yet, so the best you could do was to find something like KEDS, hopefully in leather and not in white canvas. Sometimes they wore aprons over their house dresses to protect them from getting too dirty. How that worked, I have no idea. When I come in from a day of gardening, I tend to look like I've been wallowing in the mud like a pig and I don't think an apron would change that very much. If their property was suitable for a vegetable garden, their husbands generally tended the backyard veggie garden and the women tended the front yard flower beds and the house plants, which were moved out to front porches or screened-in porches in the warm months. If they were really avid gardeners, the lawn area had been shrunk down to almost nothing and replaced by big flower beds.

I loved those gardening ladies. They were so sweet and were truly genteel southern women who believed, as was common at the time, that children were to be seen and not heard, yet they'd answer a child's questions, allow a child to help with the gardening chores under careful supervision, and would send home a bouquet of flowers with that child. They'd allow you to sit on the front porch steps with them in the evening, snapping southern peas or beans, as long as you obeyed the edict that children were to be seen and not heard. It was a big deal to be allowed to help them and to listen to their adult conversations while the younger children chased fireflies in the twilight. I miss those sorts of old gardening ladies, who of course, inevitably belonged to the local garden club, and who didn't really go out and buy a lot of plants as nurseries were not as common or as well-stocked as today. Instead they traded passalong plants amongst themselves: banana shrubs with their luscious yellow flowers and banana-like aroma, crape myrtles, four o'clocks, crinum lilies, gladiolus, wisteria, old-fashioned roses, glory bower vines, figs, and the like. They'd save and exchange seeds from old-fashioned flowers like the tall vining nasturtiums, morning glories, cockscombs, zinnias, poppies, godetia, cosmos and spider flowers (cleome). Now I am having a vision of making a scarecrow for my garden....and dressing it in a floral-print cotton housedress, an apron, a broadbrimmed hat, gardening gloves and sensible shoes. It would need to have a basket for gathering flowers, and pruning shears in one hand. I feel a spring garden project developing in my mind now! Our two nearest neighbors, one across the street and one right next door, were old gardening ladies from another era, even in the 1960s as they were a generation older than my parents and had grandhildren my age. They've been gone for decades now. Oh, how I miss them.

dbarron, Nice crocus! Nothing is that early here yet, which I blame on the recurring nights in the teens.

Jennifer, I mostly see comfrey now, running wildly amok in my garden. I'm going to have to dig up and move a lot of it in order to keep it from taking over. I think I may move it outside the garden fence. The deer couldn't hurt it much, I wouldn't think. Oh, they'll eat comfrey, but I think it will spread so quickly underground that they cannot eat it enough to destroy it. I have it in both the front and back garden and the bees do love it, so I tolerate its thuggish ways. At least it does guarantee we have green plants to look at in winter time. In our garden, only the culinary sage really looks damaged by the cold. Everything else has sailed right through winter with flying colors.

I am SO ready for spring, but I am not stupid. With the cold recurring every 7-10 days, we are nowhere near having consistent spring type weather conditions yet.

I have been awake since shortly after 3 a.m. I think it is my brain's fault---that and my late afternoon nap yesterday, which left me feeling so incredibly well-rested and not in much need, apparently, of overnight sleep. I am blaming my brain for waking me up at such an early hour because it is excited at the prospect of spending a whole day outdoors in the garden.

Dawn

Oh, we had a warm night, so other things are popping, including the lawn weeds (lamium mostly), spring beauty (lawn weed, but I love it). My winter aconite also popped into bloom this morning (didn't even notice it yesterday, the heads bend down till they open). Much more will come this week.

You're right Dawn, and that's what I meant, I just forgot that I had once known they weren't barbatus, which they're much alike. That's what I grew for several years, not the real barbatus. I do remember sweet williams though.

At my house, I don't have anything in bloom. Lots of dandelions and chickweed greening up, even henbit coming up in containers, but none of it is in bloom yet. I don't have much that would be blooming this early though - the earliest would be daffodils but mine are in the cooler part of my yard and heavily mulched with leaves, so I haven't seen signs of green from them yet. Around the corner though, they are about 1-1.5" tall. They were that tall before the polar vortex swooped in on them and they have held steady at that height, not dying back any though which was a surprise. I did notice on the way home a few days ago and then at the OKC Zoo yesterday that the forsythia is beginning to bloom. My 1 and only Mexican Hat plant put on green leaves in the warm parts of January but hasn't put on any new growth since it's been cold. It's next to the south wall of the house which generates a heat bubble so I expect to see blooms on it a few weeks earlier than in the fields.

Our weather has officially jumped the shark and it now is 79 degrees here. It is starting to feel summery out there, at least to a person used to temperatures in the 50s at this time of the year. I'd estimate we now are 25 degrees above average for this time of the year.

The spring beauties are breaking out in bloom everywhere this afternoon---even more than this morning. The henbit is blooming. I have been indoors for 15 minutes and, when I go back outdoors, I may find something else blooming. It is happening that quickly today.

dbarron, Those are such cheerful little yellow blooms! It sounds like your place is popping into bloom quickly now just like ours. It is a shame the cold is coming back.

Megan, I noticed y'all are a bit cooler than we are. I think if y'all were hitting 79 degrees this afternoon, everything would be going bonkers there like it is here. I am seeing new TX bluebonnet plants popping up out of the ground today, joining older ones that sprouted in December or January. Luckily, they are in a pasture and the taller grasses should shield them from the temperatures in the 20s late in the week.

I love early blooms, but not if it means a return to colder weather will freeze them.

We had a large gallynipper mosquito in the house last night. It flew in the back door when Tim let the dogs out. So did some moths. All we need now is a wasp or yellow jacket buzzing around and it will feel like winter has left us, though I know it has not. I am seeing something new blooming (mostly in the weed/wildflower category) every few hours today. It is wonderful and strange all at the same time.

At the rate things are happening, the purple martin scout birds should appear any day now---because they usually show up around the same time the Spring Beauties bloom here, and I know they've been making their way north through Texas for a while now. They cannot be too far away.

I am concerned this heat is going to push the asparagus to pop up out of the ground early. I haven't checked that bed today. Maybe I should. I put a thicker layer of mulch on it last year hoping to prevent it from emerging too soon, but that's likely not going to be enough once the temperatures are in the upper 70s like they are today.

Dawn

That is crazy, Dawn! It's 51 here, and I'm great with that temperature. I do see henbit everywhere suddenly, but that's about all. The jonquils are only up 2-3 inches. However in just the past two days, there are many more garlic up, and the existing garlic and cilantro have jumped up a couple inches.

The totes I got on sale are easily 25-gallon ones, so I decided I'd get some salad stuff going in one. And so that's what I'm working on today, getting some of the new containers filled and going.

Our Monday weather was crazy warm and topped out at 81 degrees. It honestly felt hot in the garden late in the day.

Tuesday was a little cooler---76 degrees. On both those days our temperatures went higher than forecast which is nice when it happens in winter, though not nearly so nice when it happens in summer.

Nothing new is blooming, but Texas bluebonnet plants are popping out of the ground like crazy down near the front gate. They shouldn't survive there in absolutely the worst dense clay that we have as they much prefer better-draining soil, but they are stubborn and tenacious and the small colony of them that I grew there from seed broadcast sowed into native pasture mowed low has survived for about 15 or so years. I'd love to have more of them, but we really are lucky to have the few that we do have.

In the garden, I noticed more plants (not in bloom yet) have emerged, undoubtedly pushed into it by the warmer soil temperatures and air temperatures we've had lately. Not only are there little dill and chamomile plants up and growing, but also fennel and lemon balm.

dbarron, Your early spring blooms are putting on such a pretty show. I don't grow many bulbing plants here because the voles eat a lot of them....but the voles don't eat daffodils, and I noticed yesterday that some of mine are close to blooming. A few days ago the daffs barely had emerged and weren't growing much, but the heat apparently changed that. The plants grew seemingly inches overnight and now have obvious flower buds emerging.

Megan, The early warmth here is awesome and is one of the reasons I always say my weather is more like the weather in Dallas-Fort Worth than OKC.

It is early yet, not quite 7 a.m., and we are sitting here at 64 degrees, headed for a high in the lower 70s. It is raining a little. After the rain stops, I'll do whatever work I can in the garden today. This heat is what pushes some of the early blooms, and unfortunately it pushes fruit trees to bloom too early most years.

Dawn

The only new thing blooming today is 'Arp' rosemary and she'll be freezing tomorrow night when we drop down to around 20 degrees. The warm weather does have all sorts of winter grasses and forbs popping up everywhere. I wonder if the cold will stop them or if they'll ignore it? My irises and gladioli (that's the plural of gladiolus and I'm not making that up, though gladioluses also can be used) are up and so are some of the daylilies. They need to show down because we'll be cold again tomorrow night.

Dawn

If the drop in temperatures didn't get them, I'll have a couple of seedling hellebores (from relatives garden self-seeding) to post soon. Nothing special, though you might say any blossom is special right now. One is white with red speckling, one is a bi-tone with white and light pink sepals alternating, also with speckling.

The little bluets in the pasture started blooming in last week's heat, but I think I forgot to mention them. The cold didn't seem to hurt anything in the garden or pastures that was up and growing, and it didn't even seem to signal the sand plums to slow down. They look like they will bloom this week, and it is far too early for that. Oddly, they are ahead of the cultivated plum and peach trees this year---usually they bloom after those do.

dbarron, I believe any and every blossom is special, especially right now when so few things are blooming. I even get excited when I see henbit blooming because the butterflies and bees love it.

I did kill a yellow jacket that was on the exterior mudroom door around last Thursday or Friday, trying to come indoors, so our early Spring is complete. Well, we don't have craneflies or June bugs appearing yet, but sometimes they pop up in March (ridiculously early, I know) when we have warm spells, so nothing would surprise me. Crickets are out and active in the garden, but so far the only grasshoppers I've seen are a few very large ones lying on the ground that have died within the last week or two. I'm betting a cold night got them. As signs of early Spring go, the cricket activity ranks right up there with early-blooming flowers.

The latest things to bloom here are the mid-season daffodils, which usually bloom closer to the end of February or even early March, and the blue eyed grass in the pastures. I do love those small blue flowers!

The native sand plums are very close to blooming. I'm glad this week's heat wave ends today because maybe we'll get cold enough again to keep them from blooming for another week or so.

I'm seeing more and more bees, moths and butterflies out. Oh, and mosquitoes. I've killed quite a few of those lately. While they are not blooming, I think their appearance must mean they are hungry and looking for blooms for food, so I hope enough of the early bloomers are making nectar for the desirable bees, moths and butterflies. and I just wish all the mosquitoes would die. A beneficial wasp came into the house the other day. It is not easy to catch one and put it back outdoors....just saying.