The crocuses of 2024

After paying for my new car battery yesterday I took a trip to the cemetery. The crocuses had been breaking the soil on my visit on Sunday but were not yet in bloom. As of Wednesday, March 6 they are just starting to unfurl.

The yellow crocus continues to appear after seventeen years.

I don't know if these crocuses were planted long ago or just appeared on their own, but they are spreading from year to year. I never saw a crocus near my father's flat marker until last year. This one is very nearly centered over the marker.

(I checked the post from 2007 linked above and it notes that my mom had planted a few purple crocuses several years earlier. It also pointed out that we were surprised to see crocuses already in bloom on March 28. Now the crocuses are pretty much spent by the end of March.)

UPDATE, 3/17/2024: The crocuses are almost all gone. When I stopped at the cemetery last weekend I could see that the flowers were wilting, apparently damaged by the cold nights we've been having. I was surprised today to see the flowers on the sunny side had been cropped off, perhaps by rabbits or deer. The ones on the shady side (seen in the top image) were there,but the flower heads were wilted. I saw what appeared to be a white plastic shopping bag twisted around the base of the vigil light, but when I tried to pull it off I realized that this was actually the remains of three elongated white crocuses. The crocus at the top of my father's marker shown in the fourth photo was also wilted, but another one had sprouted up to its left, closer to the center of the marker.