HEPATICA 



The flowers vary in color from pale blue to pure 

 white, shading to lavender and soft pink, and the 

 flower-stems come out of the ground in little tufts, 

 one root frequently producing ten to thirty individual 

 blossoms. 



This blossom is wonderfully sturdy. It opens at 

 the regulation time, and though afterward the winds 

 blow, the frost comes, or April snow falls thick and 

 fast, it is all one to the little creature, for the tinted 

 sepals then close about the stamens and pistils, the 

 three-leaved involucre enfolds them all, each tiny 

 blossom bows its head to the storm and waits till the 

 clouds roll by. Cradled in the arms of arctic snows for 

 innumerable ages, the plant has acquired a hardiness 

 out of all proportion to its apparent delicacy. The 

 centre of the flower is greenish white. The many 

 stamens have greenish white anthers; they stand 

 around the little green pistils at the centre of the flower. 

 Each pistil holds up a tiny, curved, whitish stigma. 



The Hepatica is so adapted to the shade that it 

 will not live in full sunlight. The leaves which have 

 passed the winter under the snow are rich purple 

 beneath and brown and mottled greenish above. The 

 new leaves come forth in the spring before the leaves 

 of the trees create too much shade. In the fall, after 

 the trees are bare, the leaves again become active. 



Two species grow side by side in our Northern 

 States, Hepatica trildba, sometimes called the Round- 

 Leaved Hepatica because the leaf-lobes are rounded; 

 and Hepatica acutiloba, because the leaf-lobes are 

 pointed. The first is more abundant in the Eastern 

 States, the second is the prevailing form in Ohio and 

 westward; in other respects the two are one. 



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