opening.
Preferred Habitat - Woods; light soil on hillsides.
Flowering Season - December-May.
Distribution - Canada to Northern Florida, Manitoba to Iowa and
Missouri. Most common East.

Even under the snow itself bravely blooms the delicate hepatica,
wrapped in fuzzy furs as if to protect its stems and nodding buds
from cold. After the plebeian skunk cabbage, that ought scarcely
to be reckoned among true flowers - and William Hamilton Gibson
claimed even before it - it is the first blossom to appear.
Winter sunshine, warming the hillsides and edges of woods, opens
its eyes,

"Blue as the heaven it gates at,
Startling the loiterer in the naked groves
With unexpected beauty; for the time
Of blossoms and green leaves is yet afar."

"There are many things left for May," says John Burroughs, "but
nothing fairer, if as fair, as the first flower, the hepatica. I
find I have never admired this little firstling half enough. When
at the maturity of its charms, it is certainly the gem of the
woods. What an individuality it has! No two clusters alike; all
shades and sizes.... A solitary blue-purple one, fully expanded
and rising over the brown leaves or the green moss, its cluster
of minute anthers showing like a group of pale stars on its
little firmament, is enough to arrest and hold the dullest eye.
Then,...there are individual hepaticas, or individual families
among them, that are sweet scented. The gift seems as capricious