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most plants is condensed into ten weeks, while in the mother-country the
full activity is maintained through sixteen. But even the English winter
does not seem to be a winter, in the same sense as ours, appearing more
like a chilly and comfortless autumn. There is no month in the year
when some special plant does not bloom: the Coltsfoot there opens
its fragrant flowers from December to February; the yellow-flowered
Hellebore, and its cousin, the sacred Christmas Rose of Glastonbury,
extend from January to March; and the Snowdrop and Primrose often come
before the first of February. Something may be gained, much lost, by
that perennial succession; those links, however slight, must make the
floral period continuous to the imagination; while our year gives a
pause and an interval to its children, and after exhausted October has
effloresced into Witch-Hazel, there is an absolute reserve of blossom,
until the Alders wave again.

No symbol could so well represent Nature's first yielding in spring-time
as this blossoming of the Alder, this drooping of the tresses of these
tender things. Before the frost is gone, and while the newborn season is
yet too weak to assert itself by actually uplifting anything, it can at
least let fall these blossoms, one by one, till they wave defiance to
the winter on a thousand boughs. How patiently they have waited! Men are
perplexed with anxieties about their own immortality; but these catkins,
which hang, almost full-formed, above the ice all winter, show no such
solicitude, but when March wooes them they are ready. Once relaxing,
their pollen is so prompt to fall that it sprinkles your hand as you
gather them; then, for one day, they are the perfection of grace upon
your table, and next day they are weary and emaciated, and their little
contribution to the spring is done.

Then many eyes watch for the opening of the May-flower, day by day,
and a few for the Hepatica. So marked and fantastic are the local
preferences of all our plants, that, with miles of woods and meadows
open to their choice, each selects only some few spots for its
accustomed abodes, and some one among them all for its very earliest
blossoming. There is always some single chosen nook, which you might
almost cover with your handkerchief, where each flower seems to bloom
earliest, without variation, year by year. I know one such place for
Hepatica a mile northeast,--another for May-flower two miles southwest;
and each yea