So, if you don’t treat your lawn, your neighbors will give you the stink-eye, but you’ll also have some lovely wildflowers.  The first of the season are blooming now, while grass is the dingy green of late winter.  Above, on the left, we have Bittercress (cardamine, either Pennsylvania, which is native, or Hairy, which is invasive) and, on the right, Persian Speedwell (veronica persica). You can find a a few paragraphs about these early wildflowers in Bryan MacKay’s A Year Across Maryland: A Week-by-Week Guide to Discovering Nature in the Chesapeake Region (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 62-63), which is a wonderful book for anyone who likes to tramp around the Old Line State.  While he doesn’t specifically address the Monocacy River, he often discusses the Potomac, which the Monocacy feeds.