Nor must the hazel in this earliest spring bouquet be forgotten.  The crimson stars of its fertile flowers, ten or a dozen little rays at the ends of the scaly buds on the bare stems, are the most richly colored flowers of the earliest spring.  Some years they are formed as early as the twentieth of March.  When you find them then look for the re-appearance of the mud-turtles down in the valleys and listen for the first feeble croaks of the frogs.  The old Greeks watched the tiny inner scales of these fertile flowers grow into the husk of the nut, fancied its resemblance to a helmet, and called the bush corys; whence its botanic name corylus.  Its English name comes from the Saxon haesle, a cap.  The growing hazel nuts gladdened the children of most of the early civilized world.  One of the shepherds in Vergil’s fifth eclogue invites the other to “sit beneath the grateful shade, which hazels interlaced with elms have made;” but this hazel of which Menelaus spoke was a tree.  The Romans regarded the hazel as an emblem of peace and a means of reconciling those who had been estranged.  When the gods made Mercury their messenger they gave him a hazel rod to be used in restoring harmony among the human race.  Later he added the twisted serpents at the top of this caduceus.  The caduceus also had the power of producing sleep, hence Milton calls it “the opiate rod.”

When the crimson threads appear in the scaly buds the staminate catkins are lengthening, and soon the high wind shakes the golden pollen over all the copse.  These flowers which appear before the leaves all depend upon the wind for their fertilization.  That is why they come before the leaves.  And there is always wind enough to meet all their needs.

March is a masculine month.  It was named after the war god and it always lives up to its traditions.  It has had scant courtesy from the literary men.

    "Ah, passing few are they who speak,
    Wild, stormy month, in praise of thee."

’Twas a night in March when little Gavroche took his infant proteges into the old elephant which stood in the Place de la Bastile to shelter them from the cruel wind.  It was in the twilight of a day in March, when the wind howled dismally, that Boniface Willet, in Barnaby Rudge, flattened his fat nose against the window pane and made one of his famous predictions.  It must have been a March freshet when the Knight Huldebrand put Bertalda into Kuhleborn’s wagon and the gentle Undine saved them both.  And we fancy that it was a cold night in March when Peter stood by the fire and warmed himself.

But the winds of March deserve a word of praise, as everyone knows who has filled his lungs with their vitalizing freshness and felt the earth respond to their purifying influence.  They are only boisterous, not cruel.  The specters of miasma and contagion flee before them like the last leaves.  Many of the oaks have held a wealth of withered foliage all the winter but now the leaves fly almost as fast as they did in late October, and make a dry, rustling carpet up to your shoe tops.  Now and again the wind gets down into this leaf-carpet and makes merry sport.