Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 4

leaves, at the summit of a stem about four inches high. A little farther and we find a group of them and then other clusters, fresh and pure and sweet enough to make a bouquet for Euphrosyne.
Oh, but someone says, the hepatica is the first flower of spring; all the nature writers say so. Well, but they don't seem to say much about the trillium; possibly they haven't found it so often. Indeed, it seems to be more choice of its location. It is hardly ever, perhaps it would be safe to say never, found on a southern or a southwestern slope. Almost invariably it is found on the steep slope of a river bank, facing northeast or east. Hepaticas nearly always grow on the same slope, but they come into blossom about two days later than the trillium. But on another bank which faces the noon and the afternoon sun the hepaticas are up with the trilliums in the calendar of spring. This year the trillium was found blooming, on a northeastern slope, March 24. At this place the hepatica did not bloom until March 26. But it bloomed March 24, on a southwest slope, fifteen miles away.
By-the-way, the list of March blooming plants for 1908, is probably one of the longest for years: March 20, aspen; twenty-first, hazel and silver maple; twenty-third, pussy willow, prairie willow and white elm; twenty-fourth, dwarf white trillium and hepatica (also known as liverleaf, squirrelcup, and blue anemone); twenty-fifth, slippery elm, cottonwood; twenty-ninth, box elder and fragrant sumac; thirtieth, dandelion; thirty-first, Dutchman's breeches.
How some of these early flowers secure the perpetuation of their species is an interesting study for amateur botanists. In the case of the trillium the fruit is a three-lobed reddish berry, but one has to search for it as diligently as Diogenes did for an honest man before he finds it. The plant seldom sets seed in this vicinity, but seems to depend rather upon its tuber-like rootstocks in which the leaves lie curled all through the winter. The hepatica attracts pollen-feeding flies, female hive-bees and the earliest butterflies, and is thus cross-fertilized to some extent; but it is thought also to be able to effect self-fertilization. In the case of the hepatica acutiloba, however, it has been found that staminate flowers grow on one plant and pistillate flowers on another, hence insects are essential to the perpetuation of this species.
After bringing us the trilliums and hepaticas in numbers, Nature pauses. She means to give us time to inhale the fragrance of some of the hepaticas, and to learn that other hepaticas of the same species have no fragrance at all; that there is a variety of delicate colors, white, pink, purple, lavender, and blue; that the colored parts, which look like petals are really sepals; that they usually number six, but may be as many as twelve; that there are three small sessile leaves forming an involucre directly under the flower; that if we search we shall find some with four, more rare than four-leaved clovers; that the plant which was fragrant last year will also be fragrant this year; that the furry stems are slightly pungent,--enough to give spice to a sandwich; these preliminary observations fit us for more intricate problems later on.
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Spenser, the divinely tongued, pictures April as a lusty youth, riding upon the bull with the golden horns (Taurus), wading through a flood, and adorned with garlands of the fairest flowers and buds. A better figure would have been Europa riding Zeus. And Chaucer also makes April a masculine month:
"When that Aprille with his schoweres swoote The drought of Marche had perced to the roote."
But surely April, with her smiles anl[TN-1] tears, ought to be regarded as a feminine month. Ovid has shown that she was not named from aperire, to open, as some have supposed, but from Aphrodite, the Greek name for Venus, goddess of beauty and mother of love. She is chaste, even cold, but grows sweeter and more affectionate every day and her tears all end in smiles. Her flowers are pure and mostly white, fitting for a maiden. Look at the list (if the weather is warm):
White or whitish:--Rue-anemone, hepatica, spring beauty, blood-root, toothwort, Dutchman's breeches, dog's tooth violet, wild ginger, chickweed, Isopyrum, plantain-leaved everlasting, shepherd's purse, shad-bush, wild strawberry, whitlow-grass, wind-flower, hackberry (greenish white), false Solomon's seal, catnip, spring cress, wild black currant, wild plum.
Yellow or yellowish:--Marsh marigold, creeping buttercup, marsh buttercup, small-flowered crowfoot, dandelion, yellow woodsorrel, bell-wort, star-grass, downy yellow violet, pappoose root, lousewort, prickly ash, hop hornbeam, white oak, mossy-cup oak, butternut, sugar maple.
Purple or blue:--Common blue violet, trillium (recurvatum and erectum) hepatica, Virginian cowslip (lung-wort or bluebells), woodsorrel, common blue phlox, ground plum.
Green:--The Indian turnip, and several of the sedges.
Pink:--Spring beauty, toothwort, dog's tooth