I was glad to welcome the trillium. How one loves its quaint old name of wake-robin, fitting title for this first harbinger of spring, that comes to us even before the robin’s note is heard. Many of our common wild-flowers have several names, but there is none with such invariably pretty ones as all ages have united in bestowing upon wake-robin. Birth-root, our forefathers called it, seeing the birth of the new year in its early blossoming, and how many generations have known it as the trinity-flower! But ’tis best known, I think, as wake-robin, and the very breath of spring is in the name.
A member of the great lily family is wake-robin
It loves damp, shady places and moist, rich valleys. On the Pacific Coast we do not find the typical Eastern variety, but we have a variety of our own, tho’ unmistakably wake-robin. Its color varies from rich madder-red to pale-pink, sometimes almost white. It grows from a thick, tuber-like root, and the calyx has, surrounding its three red petals and three green sepals, three broad, mottled-green leaves which, for some unaccountable reason, our florists remove when they offer the flower for sale. A strange whimsy, this. The poor blossoms, thus denuded, have a bewildered, self-conscious air, such as may have been worn by the little egg-selling woman of old, who awoke from her nap by the king’s highway to find her petticoats shorn. Well may wake-robin thus question its own identity. It is no longer the trillium of the forest: it is only the trillium of commerce, a sad, unlovely object
A bank where wake-robin lifts its bonny head is always fair to see. The plant has certain boon companions always sure to be close at hand. The Solomon’s seal is one of these, its roots bearing to this day the round marks imagined by the early foresters to be none other than the seal of Solomon, the son of David, (on both of whom be peace!)
