HIS simple delicate little plant is one of our earliest April flowers. In warm springs it is almost exclusively an April flower, but in cold and backward seasons, it often delays its blossoming time till May.
Partially hidden beneath the shelter of old decaying timbers and fallen boughs, its pretty pink buds peep shyly forth. It is often found in partially cleared beech-woods, and in rich moist meadows.
In Canada, there are two species; one with few flowers, white, both leaves and flowers larger than the more common form; the blossoms of the latter are more numerous, smaller, and of a pale pink colour, veined with lines of a deeper rose colour, forming a slender raceme; sometimes the little pedicels or flower stalks are bent or twisted to one side, so as to throw the flowers in one direction.
The scape springs from a small deep tuber, bearing a single pair of soft, oily, succulent leaves. In the white flowered species these leaves are placed about midway up the stem, but in the pink (C. Virginica) the leaves lie closer to the ground, and are smaller and of a dark bluish green hue. Our Spring Beauty well deserves its pretty poetical name. It comes in with the Robin, and the song sparrow, the hepatica, and the first white violet; it lingers in shady spots, as if unwilling to desert us till more sunny days have wakened up a wealth of brighter blossoms to gladden the eye; yet the first, and the last, are apt to be most prized by us, with flowers, as well as other treasures.
How infinitely wise and merciful are the arrangements of the Great Creator. Let us instance the connection between Bees and Flowers. In cold climates the former lie torpid, or nearly so, during the long months of Winter, until the genial rays of the sun and light have quickened vegetation into activity, and buds and blossoms open, containing the nutriment necessary for this busy insect tribe.
The Bees seem made for the Blossoms; the Blossoms for the Bees.
On a bright March morning what sound can be more in harmony with the sunshine and blue skies, than the murmuring of the honeybees, in a border of cloth of gold crocuses? what sight more cheerful to the eye? But I forget. Canada has few of these sunny flowers, and no March days like those that woo the hive bees from their winter dormitories. And April is with us only a name. We have no April month of rainbow suns and showers. We miss the deep blue skies, and silver throne-like clouds that cast their fleeting shadows over the tender springing grass and corn; we have no mossy lanes odorous with blue violets. One of our old poets thus writes:
“Ye violets that first appear,
By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the year,