Who isn't glad to see the first brave crocus pushing its little head up through last year's mulch? This year, after the snowiest winter ever recorded in these parts, the sight brought a wave of physical relief: Yippee! Winter isn't planning to last forever after all!

I saw a robin rooting around on the teensy front lawn of a row house in the neighborhood last night and couldn't take my eyes off it. Even though I know perfectly well that the local robins have been hanging around all winter, looking cold and grumpy, this first robin of spring — or, anyway, the first robin I'd noticed lately — seemed like a talisman. I see this as a symptom of pent-up demand for anything that signifies spring.

OK, maybe it's just me, but I suspect that designers and retailers who decided months ago to take a flier in floral prints must be feeling like geniuses right about now. The Liberty of London for Target Collection launched March 14, with clothes, accessories, housewares and linens enlivened with Liberty's flower prints. There are toss pillows, comforters and pillow shams, note cards, storage bins and boxes, trays, dishes, dresses, swimsuits, men's dress shirts and neckties, umbrellas and rain boots, totes and makeup bags, hats and scarves, even a Liberty-print beach cruiser.

MAC cosmetics launched a Give Me Liberty of London collection of lipsticks, shadows, blushes, etc. in springy colors in Liberty-print containers.

H&M's Garden Collection arrived March 18, with more than 70 garden-inspired dresses, tunics, peasant blouses, shorts, trousers, bags, scarves and so on, all made from recycled or sustainable materials.

Target's Liberty collection uses some of Liberty's classic small florals as well as newer, splashier ones. H&M's prints show a similar range, from traditional designs of allover itsy-bitsy flowers to some that look Impressionist or even psychedelic. A dark, watercolor-y flowered chiffon is in the same ballpark as the floral-print chiffon Ralph Lauren used in his recently unveiled collection for next fall.

Which suggests florals could be around for a while, not that they've ever entirely disappeared. And not that there's any such thing as a generic floral pattern to begin with. As quilters have noticed, floral patterns have a way of absorbing something of the spirit of the time in which they're drawn. Search for fabric from feed sacks on eBay, and you can't miss the determined cheeriness and optimism of the tidy little flowers printed on so many of them.

There's something completely different — expansive, extravagant, exotic — going on a decade later in the blowsy roses, tropical blooms and towering ferns on 1940s barkcloth. A quilt that mixed '30s feed sacks and '40s barkcloth would keep you awake nights. They just don't go.

The red roses on 1950s Wilendur tablecloths are perky, slightly stylized. Vera tablecloths and scarves from the same era have blurry, romantic flowers. Curtains and slipcovers from the '50s have stripped-down, self-consciously modern flowers that appear to feel comfortable mixing it up with spinning atoms and boomerangs. Kitchen curtains may be bordered with rows of tulips in silhouette interspersed with two-dimensional Dutch girls. Hawaiian shirts have plumeria, hibiscus, orchids and, sometimes, surfers, hula girls and tiny airplanes. (Think of it: a time when airplanes meant romance, escape, exoticism, not long lines of shoeless business travelers struggling to wrangle their laptops out of their briefcases and backpacks and then back into them again.)

But as different as all those flowers are, they all look like the 1950s.

Then come the 1960s and '70s, with splashy psychedelic flower-power florals and sharp-edged Scandinavian prints, like Maija Isola's classic Unikko print of enormous stylized poppies for Marimekko.

The way we feel about florals seems to be cyclical: Sometimes they're just the ticket, and sometimes they seem too noisy, or too sweet and safe and boring. Isola did her famous poppies almost on a dare: At the time — the floral print cycle must have bottomed out — Marimekko had a rule forbidding florals, probably meant to stave off sweet itsy-bitsies, like the classic Liberty prints. Isola found a way to do flowers that looked right for their time.

Several years ago, a friend went to a summer garden party out in the suburbs and ended up feeling like a marked woman because she'd worn, as usual, black, and every other woman there, tottering around and sinking up to the tops of her spike heels into the lawn, was in some floral print, as if somebody'd sent around a memo. The friend in black felt excluded, but also repelled by what struck her as an excess of pastel niceness, all those suburban ladies making a point of being unthreatening.

Now though, at least to me, even ditsy florals that might've looked bland and suburban, even prissy, back then look very pleasant. And the unexpected color combinations in some of the newer Liberty prints, like one of sunflowers called Susanna, are as fresh as spring.

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.