Spring comes to Connecticut

The first day of Spring brought nearly five inches of snow to southern Connecticut. After an especially long, cold, and snowy winter, this, for all its hibernal beauty, was not a welcome sight this morning:

Luckily, Van Wilgen's garden center in Branford is holding its annual "Escape to Spring" event this weekend. It's a really wonderful event, with local vendors of food, gardening products, and crafts, cooking demonstrations, horticultural society tables, and plenty of precocious plants: daffodils, hyacinths, hellebores, etc. My partner and I spent the morning there and left, predictably, with a couple plants in tow. A small, fragrant narcissus and an unidentified Paphiopedilum that I picked up from the CT Orchid Society's table.

I don't have any Paphs in my collection, so couldn't pass this one up. Right now, it's nestled on the top shelf of my grow rack, behind my light-loving Nepenthes.