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The rhododendrons don’t look all that cheery, and who could blame them? Plenty of folks do the same thing when the temperature drops like an ice-encrusted snowball: Curl up. Feel a bit droopy. Try to protect the tender parts — fingers, toes, chloroplasts.

When you’re a rhododendron leaf, that last one is critical, and if the winter greenery by the trailside is any indicator, Julie and I are in for a frigid hike. Tall rhododendrons canopy this part of the trail below Elk Knob near Todd, lending the winter-brown woods a rare swath of green. But the rhodos look positively miserable. Each leaf on each twig is curled up as tightly as the $1 bills my mom used to roll up and send the kids on their birthdays — a single bill for each year, until they got to their 20s and all those rolls wouldn’t fit into an envelope.

The rhododendron leaves droop toward the ground. They’re curled into cigar-size tubes. They look like they’d rather be anywhere but outside on a sunny but frigid day. Honestly, they look like they could use a swig of hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps.

Curled up, they thaw more slowly and are less prone to damage. photograph by J SMILANIC/DAWNFIRE PHOTOGRAPHY

As do we, come to think of it. I pull a flask from my pack pocket, and Julie’s eyes light up. “Such a good husband,” she says.

These late-winter hikes are an annual tradition, a few hours set aside to mull over the past few months and relive memories of oyster roasts, backyard campfires, and late nights wishing — in vain, usually — for blankets of morning snow.

And they serve as a bit of a send-off, as well. By March, to be honest, we’re pretty much over scarves and gloves. We’ve done enough curling up and hunkering down. We’re jonesing for longer, warmer days, and these hikes are a chance to start planning a bit of sun-worshiping.

But I look at the rhododendron leaves, and I know it’ll be a little longer.

• • •

If you live anywhere near a wild rhododendron, you’re likely familiar with this sight. In winter months, rhododendron leaves droop like children who are told they can’t have another piece of candy. When air temperatures plummet, they curl up like lapdogs by the fire.

They’re akin to nature’s thermometers: Above freezing, rhododendron leaves are nearly flat. Around 25 degrees Fahrenheit, they curl like a bad perm. At 20 degrees, they’re wrapped as tight as a tick on a dog. Below 20 degrees — well, you really should be making your way home at that point.

This phenomenon of plants reacting physically to changes in their environment has awed observers for centuries. Plants whose flowers turn to track the sun across the sky or open and close due to light conditions were once figured as a sort of “natural magic,” a mashup of the occult and an infant understanding of empirical science.

When air temperatures plummet, they curl up like lapdogs by the fire.

As magical as plants may be, we’ve come a long way since then. The response of the rhododendrons to an arctic blast is now known as “thermonastic movement” — a nondirectional response to something in the environment. It gets cold as all get-out, as a scientist would never say, and the rhodos can’t just run to the closest gas fireplace. So they curl up and shelter in place.

But it’s not just because they’re cold, actually. The drooping response of plants has more to do with the sun than the thermometer. Unlike Julie, rhododendrons evolved to thrive in the shade. They are understory plants, and once trees shed their foliage, all that sunlight can be damaging to rhododendron leaves. Too much light on leaf tissues can give these plants a bad case of sunburn, damaging the chloroplasts responsible for photosynthesis.

The rapid cycle of thawing during the day and freezing at night is no picnic for rhododendrons either. Think of leaf lettuce that freezes then thaws in the back of the refrigerator. Yuck. No self-respecting rhododendron wants to go out like that.

In the summer, after a long winter spent huddled up against the cold, rosebay rhododendrons show off clusters of blooms along the Oconaluftee River outside Cherokee. photograph by J SMILANIC/DAWNFIRE PHOTOGRAPHY

On the trail, Julie and I find a sunny spot on a large rock and take a breather. Our thermonastic response is exactly the opposite of the rhododendrons’ — we sprawl out, turning our faces to soak up every photon of the weak winter sun. Heliotropism — that’s a different sort of plant response, the tendency of some flowers to track the sun as it moves across the sky. If Julie were a plant, she’d definitely be a heliotropic daisy.

Another form of sun-worshiping flowers are those that only bloom during the light of day. The early-rising morning glory might be the most famous, but there are others — like the portulaca that hang in pots from our shed in Morehead City. Being the owner of a dull-brown thumb, I didn’t realize that these flowers tend to close up at night. That makes it difficult to point them out to dinner guests and brag about my gardening skills. Like rhododendrons, portulaca have evolved to make the best of their changing environment. They open their flowers during the day, when pollinating insects are most active, and close as the sun goes down.

So the flowers hang around at night, waiting for dawn. Julie and I are sort of like that this time of year. Waiting on the sun, waiting on spring. Like a nodded-off portulaca, lifting a sleepy eyelid to peek at the rosy hues in an eastern sky. It’s been a long winter, but we can see it: The light is coming. Spring is on the way.