TRANSACTIONS 
OF 
THE CROYDON MICROSCOPICAL AND 
NATURAL HISTORY CLUB. 
1897—98. 
135.—On tHe Times or Frowerine or Harty Spring FLowers. 
By H. Franxuin Parsons, M.D., F.G.S. 
(Read February 16th, 1897.) 
To the lover of a garden the hardy flowers of early spring 
are especially attractive, not only for their modest beauty and 
intrinsic interest, but also as harbingers after the long dreary 
winter of sunny hours to come. Hence it has been my pleasure 
for some years past to cultivate as many early spring flowering 
plants as I could, and to watch for and record year by year the 
dates of their appearance in blossom. Later in the season, 
when the appearance of a new flower has lost much of its 
novelty, the keeping of the record has, I am sorry to say, been 
neglected. 
f the early flowers of our gardens, some are British plants, 
more or less modified by cultivation ; most of the old favourites 
are Huropean, though many attractive bulbous plants of more 
recent introduction come from Western Asia, e.g. Chionodoxa 
Lacilia, Scilla sibirica, and Puschkinia libanotica. Not a few are 
natives of mountain and northern localities, where they flower 
later in the year than with us, coming out immediately after the 
melting of the snow. Many are in their wild state natives of 
woods, where they find shelter from the sharp frosts and keen 
winds of spring ; while, blooming before the trees come into leaf, 
they are not shaded from the sun’s rays as they would be if they 
bloomed later in the year. Here they often grow in great 
Masses, carpeting the ground, as we see with our wood anemones, 
B 
