The buttercups are slow this year.  After three years of watching buttercups emerge above Kamloops, we know that the first flower emerges typically between March 10 and March 31.  This year we don’t see the first buttercup until March 28.  As part of a fourth-year plant evolution class, my students are monitoring the flowering phenology and we spent the middle two weeks of March, waiting while the buttercup buds remained tightly closed.  Yesterday we tagged our first open flower.