_Flowering Season_--March-May.

_Distribution_--Pennsylvania, westward to Minnesota and Iowa, south
to Kentucky.

Only this delicate little flower, as white as the snow it sometimes must
push through to reach the sunshine melting the last drifts in the
leafless woods, can be said to wake the robins into song; a full chorus
of feathered love-makers greets the appearance of the more widely
distributed, and therefore better known, species.

By the rule of three all the trilliums, as their name implies,
regulate their affairs. Three sepals, three petals, twice three
stamens, three styles, a three-celled ovary, the flower growing out
from a whorl of three leaves, make the naming of wake-robins a simple
matter to the novice.

One of the most chastely beautiful of our native wild flowers--so lovely
that many shady nooks in English rock-gardens and ferneries contain
imported clumps of the vigorous plant--is the Large-flowered Wake-Robin,
or White Wood Lily (_T. grandiflorum_). Under favorable conditions the
waxy, thin, white, or occasionally pink, strongly veined petals may
exceed two inches; and in Michigan a monstrous form has been found. The
broadly rhombic leaves, tapering to a point, and lacking petioles, are
seated in the usual whorl of three, at the summit of the stem, which may
attain a foot and a half in height; from the centre the decorative
flower arises on a long peduncle.

Certainly the commonest trillium in the East, although it thrives as far