Spring weather remains quite over the horizon, and any thought of putting the wood stove to bed for the season—to say nothing of gloves, long underwear (even in the house), and parkas—is not in the foreseeable future. Still, it's not as bone-chilling as it has been, and, if you're persistent and know where to look, you can find signs that the natural world, albeit slowly, is not standing pat. Today, in a stretch of my more wild gardens that edge the woods, I discovered the first Lungwort blossoms. The plant, a member of the Pulmonaria clan, is not a native, but it seems so at home here that it might as well be a local, rather than an import from Europe and Asia. Lungwort, in a variety of languages, gets its common and scientific names from an ancient "medical" notion called the Doctrine of Signatures—the idea that any resemblance a plant part bore to a human disease would suggest how it could be used as a cure. Lungwort has spotted leaves, and these, said the first physicians, looked like ailing lungs. Any attempt at using Pulmonaria to cure pulmonary problems, alas, failed, but the flowers are not without a species of efficacy: seeing them elevates the spirits.