White violet (VIOLA BLANDA).
Canada violet (VIOLA CANADENSIS).
Hepatica (occasionally fragrant).
Trailing arbutus (EPIGÆA REPENS).
Mandrake (PODOPHYLLUM
PELTATUM).
Yellow lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
PARVIFLORUM).
Purple lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
ACAULE).
Squirrel corn (DICENTRA CANADENSIS).
Showy orchis (ORCHIS SPECTABILIS).
Purple fringed-orchis (HABENARIA
PSYCODES).
Arethusa (ARETHUSA BULBOSA).
Calopogon (CALOPOGON
PULCHELLUS).
Lady's-tresses (SPIRANTHES CERNUA).
Pond-lily (NYMPHÆA ODORATA).
Wild rose (ROSA NITIDA).
Twin-flower (LINNÆA BOREALIS).
Sugar maple (ACER SACCHARINUM)
Linden (TILIA AMERICANA).
Locust-tree (ROBINIA PSEUDACACIA).
White alder (CLETHRA ALNIFOLIA).
Smooth azalea (RHODODENDRON
ARBORESCENS).
White azalea (RHODODENDRON
VISCOSUM).
Pinxter-flower (RHODODENDRON
NUDIFLORUM).
Yellow azalea (RHODODENDRON
CALENDULACEUM),
Sweet bay (MAGNOLIA GLAUCA).
Mitchella vine (MITCHELLA REPENS).
Sweet coltsfoot (PETASITES PALMATA).
Pasture thistle (CNICUS PUMILUS).
False wintergreen (PYROLA
ROTUNDIFOLIA).
Spotted wintergreen (CHIMAPHILIA
MACULATA).
Prince's pine (CHIMAPHILIA
UMBELLATA).
Evening primrose (ÂŒNOTHERA
BIENNIS).
Hairy loosestrife (STEIRONEMA
CILIATUM).
Dogbane (APOCYNUM).
Ground-nut (APIOS TUBEROSA).
Adder's-tongue pogonia (POGONIA
OPHIOGLOSSOIDES).
Wild grape (VITIS CORDOFOLIA).
Horned bladderwort (UTRICULARIA
CORNUTA).

The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the most fragrant flower we have. In a warm, moist atmosphere, its odor is almost too strong. It is a plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape less than a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or helmet shaped flowers. It is not common, and belongs pretty well north, growing in sandy swamps and along the marshy margins of lakes and ponds. Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree. I have placed in the above list several flowers that are intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-leaf. This flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one of the most beautiful, to be found in our woods, and occasionally it is fragrant. Group after group may be inspected, ranging through all shades of purple and blue, with some perfectly white, and no odor be detected, when presently you will happen upon a little brood of them that have a most delicate and delicious fragrance. The same is true of a species of loosestrife growing along streams and on other wet places, with tall bushy stalks, dark green leaves, and pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European). A handful of these flowers will sometimes exhale a sweet fragrance; at other times, or from another locality, they are scentless. Our evening primrose is thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past season I examined many specimens, and failed to find one that was so. Some seasons the sugar maple yields much sweeter sap than in others; and even individual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, and other conditions where they stand, show a great difference in this respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented flowers. I had always supposed that our Canada violet—the tall, leafy-stemmed white violet of our Northern woods—was odorless, till a correspondent called my attention to the contrary fact. On examination I found that, while the first ones that bloomed about May 25 had very sweet-scented foliage, especially when crushed in the hand, the flowers were practically without fragrance. But as the season advanced the fragrance developed, till a single flower had a well-marked perfume, and a handful of them was sweet indeed. A single specimen, plucked about August 1, was quite as fragrant as the English violet, though the perfume is not what is known as violet, but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of certain fruit trees.

It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple are sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few days: but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at nightfall on the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence, and the air is laden with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks later.

After the linnæa and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-scented flowering vine our woods hold is the common mitchella vine, called squaw-berry and partridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin flowers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most agreeable fragrance.

Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the European, and many of ours are fragrant. The first to bloom in the spring is the showy orchis, though it is far less showy than several others. I find it in May, not on hills, where Gray says it grows, but in low, damp places in the woods. It has two oblong shining leaves, with a scape four or five inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink- purple flowers. I usually find it and the fringed polygala in bloom at the same time; the lady's-slipper is a little later. The purple fringed-orchis, one of the most showy and striking of all our orchids, blooms in midsummer in swampy meadows and in marshy, grassy openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column or cylinder of pink-purple fringed flowers, that one may see at quite a distance, and the perfume of which is too rank for a close room. This flower is, perhaps, like the English fragrant orchis, found in pastures.

Few fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have come to us from the Old World, and this leads me to remark that plants with sweet- scented flowers are, for the most part, more intensely local, more fastidious and idiosyncratic, than those without perfume. Our native thistle—the pasture thistle—has a marked fragrance, and it is much more shy and limited in its range than the common Old World thistle that grows everywhere. Our little, sweet white violet grows only in wet places, and the Canada violet only in high, cool woods, while the common blue violet is much more general in its distribution. How fastidious and exclusive is the cypripedium! You will find it in one locality in the woods, usually on high, dry ground, and will look in vain for it elsewhere. It does not go in herds like the commoner plants, but affects privacy and solitude. When I come upon it in my walks, I seem to be intruding upon some very private and exclusive company. The large yellow cypripedium has a peculiar, heavy, oily odor.

In like manner one learns where to look for arbutus, for pipsissewa, for the early orchis; they have their particular haunts, and their surroundings are nearly always the same. The yellow pond-lily is found in every sluggish stream and pond, but NYMPHÆA ODORATA requires a nicer adjustment of conditions, and consequently is more restricted in its range. If the mullein were fragrant, or toadflax, or the daisy, or blue-weed, or goldenrod, they would doubtless be far less troublesome to the agriculturist. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule I have here indicated, but it holds in most cases. Genius is a specialty: it does not grow in every soil; it skips the many and touches the few; and the gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.

"Do honey and fragrance always go together in the flowers? "Not uniformly. Of the list of fragrant wild flowers I have given, the only ones that the bees procure nectar from, so far as I have observed, are arbutus, dicentra, sugar maple, locust, and linden. Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of the raspberry, clematis, sumac, white oak, bugloss, ailanthus, goldenrod, aster, fleabane. A large number of odorless plants yield pollen to the bee. There is nectar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes gets it by piercing the spur from the outside as she does with dicentra. There ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but I have never seen the hive-bee make any attempt to get it.

WEEDS

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds. How they cling to man and follow him around the world, and spring up wherever he sets his foot! How they crowd around his barns and dwellings, and throng his garden and jostle and override each other in their strife to be near him! Some of them are so domestic and familiar, and so harmless withal, that one comes to regard them with positive affection. Motherwort, catnip, plantain, tansy, wild mustard,—what a homely human look they have! they are an integral part of every old homestead. Your smart new place will wait long before they draw near it. Or knot-grass, that carpets every old dooryard, and fringes every walk, and softens every path that knows the feet of children, or that leads to the spring, or to the garden, or to the barn, how kindly one comes to look upon it! Examine it with a pocket glass and see how wonderfully beautiful and exquisite are its tiny blossoms. It loves the human foot, and when the path or the place is long disused, other plants usurp the ground.