Spring Cancellations

For the past few weeks it seems like I'm spending at least a few minutes each day on email cancelling or indefinitely postponing various talks and meetings. Back in early March, the Connecticut Cactus & Succulent Society held a meeting as scheduled, but there was some talk among the officers about whether future events would have to be shut down because of COVID-19. Now, at the beginning of April, that seems like it was years ago. This month's big cactus annual cactus show is cancelled, of course, and at this point we're hoping to be able to be able to hold one in March 2021.

The UConn campus is mostly shut down, with classes finishing out the semester online. I'm still coming in to keep the research and teaching greenhouses operational; fortunately it is easy to maintain appropriate physical distancing, with very few other people on campus at this point.

Hepatica americana in Storrs, Ct, April 1, 2020. 

 Spring is underway out in the woods, regardless of the shutting down of so much human activity. I got out for a short hike after work today, and saw that the flowering season had started for a lovely native wildflower, Round-lobed Hepatica. I have been checking in on this particular patch of a dozen hepatica plants for more than 20 years, and it hasn't changed much over the decades; I suspect that the plants are very long-lived. 

Hepatica americana is in the plant family Ranunculaceae (the buttercup family). Some botanists lump Hepatica into the closely-related genus Anemone; this species would be Anemone americana under that treatment.