First Flowers of Spring '14

At close to 0ºC/32ºF today, I walked out to view a corner of the landscape that gets a lot of the water that runs down our street. I have been making my plant order for this spring delivery. The best shrubs I can plant tin that corner are willows. They love to drink up the extra water and help to prevent the flooding in the lawn that we saw yesterday. I an not talking about those big weeping willow trees, but willow family shrubs or hedging plants.
Well, I was surprised to discover the black pussy willows have popped out. They grow on dark red woody stems. The bushes could have reached full maturity by now. There are three bushes 3 and 1/2 feet around and nearly 3 feet tall. I reached down in and pruned out a thick branch that was going to get in the way this summer as I ride my mower between them. It is suitable for forcing in water. Then I pruned a few smaller branches and went over to see if the regular silvery grey pussy willows had come out of their papery shells. They have not... except one had blooms at the end of a thick woody stem.
Now, there are pussy willow branches being forced in a tall jar of water for future plants to go into the wet ground. Since I have not seen these red-stemmed, black pussy willow bushes for sale anywhere since I purchased my three 7 years ago. Do you have them where you live?
To give you an idea of how different this winter/spring season is, two years ago I picked silver pussy willow buds to take down to Mississippi as my sister in law loves them but cannot grow them They require an extended cold winter which the Deep South does not have. The black pussies were all done as they really are the first blooms in my garden. That was by the second week in March. Best guess is we are between 3 to 4 weeks behind where gardens 'normally' are here. I wonder if the tulips will be blooming in July!
I would like to start some seeds indoors but I cannot tell what our last frost date will be. Perhaps May 30th? One hopes...
Thank you all for your encouraging words. I regret blipping so many snow and ice photos and griping about it. We always get snow here that lasts for about two months. Everyone would miss it if we did not get snow. And this is what fills the wells for drinking water each year. At this time everyone in the village is grumbling about the snow!
Here is my garden's first flower bouquet for 2014. Also note the fine glass globe holding the stem? It was destroyed, never to be seen again, after this blip was taken.
I had gone into another room to download and edit the photos. Everything in the house stopped , the big cats jumped up from their naps, when a tinkling crash of glass occurred. Gracie T-t who is ever curious of water seems to have swiped the little vase onto the floor. It's the most ridiculous thing that as I am both wiping up the water and the tiny slivers of glass all three cats found a reason to run back and forth across the accident site. I didn't want them to get a little shard in a paw and so I could not mop fast enough.
Curiosity and cats... is must be genetic.
Well, they are a different types of pussies. Two of them are black and one is silver grey... like today's flowers.