At the end of  “Casablanca” the police chief commands his assistant to “round up the usual suspects.” And every spring, as gardeners, as writers, that’s what we do whenever we dust off that “harbinger of spring” cliché.
Snowdrops, aconite, crocus, scilla—the usual suspects.

In a perfect world, I’d be able to coin a replacement phrase, one so perfectly apt it would eventually become the cliché of the future. But failing that, I’d like to at least come up with some unusual suspects.

I spent a couple hours in the garden last weekend, cleaning up by knocking down the dead stalks of asters, phlox, Oriental lilies, peonies, Japanese anemones and carting them off to the compost pile. Whenever I wanted a break, I started rummaging in the mulch, and whaddya know, there they were, the (forgive me) harbingers of spring.

First, the lady’s mantle. Run your fingers through its carpet of dead leaves in mid-March, and you’re bound to find some brand-new crinkly pale green ones right down next to the soil. The same proved true for the 6-foot tall rudbeckia cultivar ‘Herbstsonne’ or ‘Autumn Sun’ which had also sprouted some itty-bitty new leaves.

Then I checked the hellebores. They celebrate spring by flowering first and making leaves second, and sure enough, there they were, flowers, still budded but beginning to unfurl.

A few days later, I made a patrol of the backyard and spied the pale green “noses” of celadine poppies poking through. I started with just one of these hard-working, hard-nosed natives 15 years ago, a gift from a neighbor. The last time I counted, in 2007, I had 60.

So now it’s officially here—spring. The calendar says so. But I already knew it. After all, I had already seen the harbingers.

—Carolyn Ulrich