flowers that bloom in the spring tra-la

I am not sure when this happened, but all of a sudden it is no longer winter in Rennes. People are still dragging about in their black wool coats, but we have flowers and green things and that scent of springy-ness that for some reason smells the same here as it does everywhere else. The camilia outside my house is starting to weep pink petals and by the church in town the massive shrubberies have started putting out white and pink flowers. Yesterday I rounded the corner on my walk in the Parc du thabor/jardin des plantes and came across a hillside of crocuses.
These crocuses were probably the most (only??)  spontaneous display in the whole park. The neon orange clad city workers labor each day to clip and trim and tease reluctant plants into order. The result is quite impressive.  To enter you walk through the standard French municipal green gate and then sweep up a wide stone opera staircase with banasters and Ming-vase-sized flower pots. Chosing right or left, you wander up through crawling vines( crawling only in the right places) and past a tumbling stream bed that must have water piped into it during summer. There are acres of green grass, large stately trees, a circular goldfish pond, a Victorian arboritum ( I think this must be the "des plantes" bit because otherwise what a ridiculous name for a park: The Garden of the Plants). The carousel is not running right now, nor are the fountains, but someone has planted hundreds of spring flowers. There are dozens of varieties of ducks in their own pen. There is a rose laberynth with each variety carefully labled. There are dozens of varieties of trees in the rose garden too-- all on stakes and pruned to be a meter high. Yesterday when I was there, the orange workers were wrestling with what I can only call a rose serpent. It was a vine about an inch in diameter with giant thorns which was being neatly wrapped around trelising. The end result was hundreds of feet of vicious looking thorns tamed around posts and wires to resemble a gently undulating high tension electric line about nine feet off the ground. It must be lovely and romantic in summer time a regular cosine wave of roses. In February it looks like Constantine wire. I was super impressed: how do they DO that?
 The park near my house is not nearly as formal as this downtown monument. It is low and marshy with ducks, a picnic area and a 90s playground and a 21st century playground. This 90s baby knows which one she prefers! There are huge signs warning you not to walk on the ice and also a display about natural consciousness in the urban environment. The roar of the Rocade which is the periferal highway cuts through the omnipresent mist. I am not sure how you can trumpet the environmental conscienceness of landscaped duck ponds, but Rennes does do a wonderful job with providing little bits of green space for every single appartment dweller. There are snaking paths and parks amidst all of the subsidized housing-- I keep getting lost there amidst the paths and the highrises.