Unseasonable rain showers have kept maypole dancing to a minimum for the first few days of May.  But longtime dwellers of the Central Valley know to keep their shorts and tank tops handy. It is going to be scorching hot soon.  Spring is effectively over.  Like a clock-watcher at the end of her work shift, spring is so out of here the moment the summer sun arrives, and nobody is going to see her mild days and chilly nights again until 2010.

So forget looking up at the cloudy skies.  Look down on the ground.  Wildflowers -- or weeds, if you please -- tell us that summer is coming.  If you've done any crawling around in the grass in the last week or two, you'll have noticed that most wildflowers have gone to seed. The bees and Persephone have done the work of regeneration. The biosphere gets another turn on the solar the merry-go-round.

This Storksbill fruit, for instance, has grown its full five inches. There is nothing left for it to do but dry up and get stuck in your sock.

The wild radish (yellow) and the ubiquitous hairy vetch (white-tipped purple) have both been knocked up and have seed pods to show for it.

(These wild radishes do in fact taste like radishes).

The rose clover below has a beautiful generic name: Trifolium, which is Latin for three leaves. It is in the pea family like the vetch. The writer is unsure where the clover keeps its seeds, but if you look very closely at its flower you can see the typical Fabaceae form of each of its florets.

All photos were taken by Jeff McCrory at the Sunrise section of the American River parkway