* * * * *

We climb the slope again and pause in front of a big sugar maple, a rather rare sight hereabouts.  The sap-sucker has bored a row of fresh holes in the bark of the tree and the syrup has flowed out so freely that the whole south side of the tree is wet with it.  Scores of wasps, bees and flies of all sizes and colors are revelling in the sweetness.

Finally we come to where there is less grass but more dead leaves and leaf mould, and here is the first real herbaceous flower of this spring, the dwarf white trillium, or wake-robin.  How beautiful it looks, its three pure, waxy-white petals, its six golden anthers and three long styles, and its pretty whorl of three ovate leaves, at the summit of a stem about four inches high.  A little farther and we find a group of them and then other clusters, fresh and pure and sweet enough to make a bouquet for Euphrosyne.

Oh, but someone says, the hepatica is the first flower of spring; all the nature writers say so.  Well, but they don’t seem to say much about the trillium; possibly they haven’t found it so often.  Indeed, it seems to be more choice of its location.  It is hardly ever, perhaps it would be safe to say never, found on a southern or a southwestern slope.  Almost invariably it is found on the steep slope of a river bank, facing northeast or east.  Hepaticas nearly always grow on the same slope, but they come into blossom about two days later than the trillium.  But on another bank which faces the noon and the afternoon sun the hepaticas are up with the trilliums in the calendar of spring.  This year the trillium was found blooming, on a northeastern slope, March 24.  At this place the hepatica did not bloom until March 26.  But it bloomed March 24, on a southwest slope, fifteen miles away.

By-the-way, the list of March blooming plants for 1908, is probably one of the longest for years:  March 20, aspen; twenty-first, hazel and silver maple; twenty-third, pussy willow, prairie willow and white elm; twenty-fourth, dwarf white trillium and hepatica (also known as liverleaf, squirrelcup, and blue anemone); twenty-fifth, slippery elm, cottonwood; twenty-ninth, box elder and fragrant sumac; thirtieth, dandelion; thirty-first, Dutchman’s breeches.

How some of these early flowers secure the perpetuation of their species is an interesting study for amateur botanists.  In the case of the trillium the fruit is a three-lobed reddish berry, but one has to search for it as diligently as Diogenes did for an honest man before he finds it.  The plant seldom sets seed in this vicinity, but seems to depend rather upon its tuber-like rootstocks in which the leaves lie curled all through the winter.  The hepatica attracts pollen-feeding flies, female hive-bees and the earliest butterflies, and is thus cross-fertilized to some extent; but it is thought also to be able to effect self-fertilization.  In the case of the hepatica acutiloba, however, it has been found that staminate flowers grow on one plant and pistillate flowers on another, hence insects are essential to the perpetuation of this species.