Nature’s first flowers are those of the amentaceous trees, and the earliest of these are the pussy willow, the quaking asp, and the hazel.  All of them are quick to respond to the kindly influences of a vase of water and a sunny window and we may have all three of these first blossoms in a spring bouquet at home by the first of March.  Towards the last of February the catkins of the pussy willows and the aspens are creeping from beneath their budscales to meet the goddess of spring half way, and every warm day in March coaxes them a little farther.  Meanwhile the staminate catkins of the hazel are lengthening and the pistillate buds are swelling, as the sun presses farther northward at the dawn and the dusk of each day, pushing back the gray walls of the canon of night, that the river of day may flow full and free.

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This year some of the aspens heralded the spring.  They grew at the head of a little creek which traversed a long, sunny, sheltered swamp.  Their gray green trunks were in the foreground of the Master Planter’s color design, the darker and taller background being a mixture of wild cherry, red oak, linden, and white ash.  The high notes were given by the rose purple of the raspberry, the dark maroon of the blackberry, and the orange varnished budscales of the aspens themselves,—­Nature never forgets her color accents.  In the earliest warm days of February the catkins of the aspens were peeping from their imprisoning scales, and by the first of March they were half out, their white silken fringes and tiny clusters of rose-pink stamens glistening in the sunlight as if spring’s pink cheeks were sheltered by soft, gray fur.  We look up at these fleecy clusters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as “a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain and a meadow.”

Only an aspen tree in an Iowa slough!  Yes, but more than that.  This is the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring.  When the pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more than that which met the eye existed in the sacred things; that whosoever entered the temple of Lindus, to do honor to Demeter, the productive and nourishing power of the earth, must be pure in heart if he would gain reward.  The square, the flag, the cross, the swelling bud of spring, what are they all but symbols of the realities?