In the past couple of weeks, a few philosophical daredevils have shaken off the shivers of Winter and defied the more timid maples to awake from their ever so slightly Humean sceptical slumbers. When maple and birch are still showing broom like stiffness against the iodine sky, the magnolia is secretly planning its morning advance. And barely has it shed the skin of its buds when other early arrivals take a chance on the weather, actively self-forgetting like Nietzschean aphorists, the treasure they found gleefully in the morning that they had hid the night before. I am referring to the daffy dills, of course, the fried eggs of a Dionysian breakfast. Not forgetting the tulips, which Dutch Princess Juliana keeps giving our city, long after she was Queen, proving that a rested bulb can last forever, especially when chastened by a bouffant. Some dos never get old, as we see from the more traditional bouffant, before and after, then and now. A surprising number of years...