When the wave primroses bloom, it’s officially summer. The calendar might pretend it knows the exact date, but it’s the flowers that really know.

Calendars and clocks and watches and that little time/date thing at the bottom right of a computer are useful, yes.

But if you want to know when summer’s really here, look at the flowers.

And if you have wave primroses, you are luckier than most. They are absofrickenlutely beautiful, and they breed underground and spread like wildfire, almost before your very eyes. I planted eight little dead-looking sticks last summer, and this summer I’ve got about four square feet of them, plus all the little escapees.

They smell good, too.

Yup, summer’s here. It might be in the high fifties some days, still, but it’s summer. The wave primroses are starting to bloom.