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.

After bringing us the trilliums and hepaticas in numbers, Nature pauses.
She means to give us time to inhale the fragrance of some of the
hepaticas, and to learn that other hepaticas of the same species have no
fragrance at all; that there is a variety of delicate colors, white,
pink, purple, lavender, and blue; that the colored parts, which look
like petals are really sepals; that they usually number six, but may be
as many as twelve; that there are three small sessile leaves forming an
involucre directly under the flower; that if we search we shall find some
with four, more rare than four-leaved clovers; that the plant which was