As if the spring were all your own,
What are ye when the rose is blown.”[[2]]
We miss the turfy banks, studded with starry daisies, pale primroses and azure blue-bells.
Our May is bright and sunny, more like to the English March; it is indeed a month of promise—a month of many flowers. But too often its fair buds and blossoms are nipped by frost, “and winter, lingering, chills the lap of May.”
In the warmth and shelter of the forest, vegetation appears. The black leaf mould, so light and rich, quickens the seedlings into rapid growth, and green leaves and opening buds follow soon after the melting of the snows of winter. The starry blossoms of the hepatica, blood-root, bellwort, violets, white, yellow and blue, with the delicate Coptis (gold-thread), come forth and are followed by many a lovely flower, increasing with the more genial seasons of May and June.
But our April flowers are but few, comparatively speaking, and so we prize our early Violets, Hepaticas and Spring Beauty.
| [1] | Miskodeed—Indian name for Spring Beauty. |
| [2] | Sir Henry Wotton—written in 1651. |