October is not the month of flowers, even if it does claim the witch-hazel for its own. It is the month of mushrooms. There is something unnatural and uncanny about the witch-hazel, blossoming with sear leaf and limbs half bare. I never come upon it without a start. The sedges are dead, the maples leafless, the robins gone, the muskrats starting their winter lodges; and here, in the yellow autumn sun, straggles this witch-hazel, naked like the willows and alders, but spangled thick with yellow blossoms! Blossoms, indeed, but not flowers. Hydras they look like, from the dying lily-pads, crawling over the bush to yellow and die with the rest of the dying world.
Witch-hazel.
No natural, well-ordered plant ought to be in flower when its leaves are falling; but if stumps and dead trees are to blossom, of course leaf-falling time would seem a proper enough season. And what can we call it but blossoming, when an old oak-stump, dead and rotten these ten years, wakes up after a soaking rain, some October morning, a very mound of delicate, glistening, brick-red mushrooms? It is as great a wonder and quite as beautiful a mystery as the bursting into flower of the marsh-marigolds in May. But no deeper mystery, for—"dead," did I call these stumps? Rotten they may be, but not dead. There is nothing dead out of doors. There is change and decay in all things; but if birds and bugs, if mosses and mushrooms, can give life, then the deadest tree in the woods is the very fullest of life.