Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 5

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 violet, hepatica.
Scarlet:--Columbine.
From this list it ought to be plain that April is a dainty queen, wearing a
dress of cheerful green, a bodice of white, with violets in her hands,
pink in her cheeks, and a single scarlet columbine in her wealth of
golden hair, which indeed comes nearly being the portrait of Dione
herself. Or, as one of the poets has better described her:
April stood with tearful face With violets in her hands, and in her hair
Pale wild anemones; the fragrant lace Half-parted from her breast,
which seemed like fair, Dawn-tinted mountain snow, smooth-drifted
there.
In this long list of April flowers--some observers will be able to make it
still longer--there are many favorites. The pretty rue-anemone recalls
the tradition that Anemos, the wind, chose the delicate little flowers of
this family as the heralds of his coming in early spring. And in the
legend of Venus and Adonis the anemone is the flower that sprang
from the tears of the queen as she mourned the death of her loved one.
Theocritus put the wind-flowers into his Idylls, and Pliny said that only
the wind could open them. The Spring beauty has as rich a legend, for

it was the Indian Miskodeed, left behind when Peboan, the winter, the
Mighty One, was melted by the breath of spring. The toothwort
(dentaria laciniata) is sometimes known as the pepper-root, and every
school boy and girl living near the woods is familiar with the taste of its
tubers and the appearance of its cross-shaped flowers. The plumy
dicentra, or Dutchman's breeches, seems so feminine as to be grossly
misnamed until we remember that it was first discovered in the Rip
Van Winkle country. The wild ginger with its two large leaves and its
queer little blossoms close to the ground is another delight to the
saunterer along the rocky slopes, where the feathery shad-bush--the
aronia of Whittier--with its wealth of snowy blossoms and the wild
plum not far away, with its masses of pure white, are inspirations to
clean and sweet lives, calling to mind the lines of Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral
evil and of good Than all the sages can.
In rocky fields and hillsides and dry open woods, the dwarf everlasting
(Antennaria plantaginifolia) with its silvery-white little florets set in
delicate cups, is one of the first species of the great composite family to
bloom. We take it from between the rocks and think of those lines of
Tennyson, which John Fiske declared to be among the deepest thoughts
ever uttered by poet:
Flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you
here, root and all in my hand Little flower,--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and
man is.
Even more innocent, fresh and fair, is the bloodroot, with its snowy
petals, golden center and ensanguined root-stock which crimsons the
fingers that touch it. This is the herb, so the legend says, which the
Israelites in Egypt dipped in sacrificial blood to mark their doorposts.
As long ago as last November we dug up one of the papery sheaths and
found the flower, then about a half inch long, snugly wrapped in its
single leaf; and now the pale green leaf has pushed up and unfolded,
showing the fragile flower in all its beauty.

* * * * *
Strange contrasts we see in some of these April flowers. Some of them
open their star-like eyes for a day or two and dot the floor of the woods
with beauty and then their little contribution to the spring is done and
they are seen no more until another year. They bring us beauty and
sweetness and then they pass from us, like the sweet and childish but
perfect lives we all have known and loved. In contrast to such as these
there is the Jack-in-the-pulpit of the April woods which has no floral
envelope of beauty, no fragrance, no inspiration, so busy is it storing up
its swollen fortunes down in the bank, leaving behind it a tuber so rank
and tainted that even the Indians couldn't eat it until they had first
roasted it, then ground it into powder, and finally made it into a kind of
bread. But sordid-lived accumulators, herbaceous and human, have
been with us since the world began. Laban was a monopolist