HEPATICA (Liverleaf) 

 Hepatica acutiloba DC. 



April It is a day in March, sunny, bright, but still cool and 



Wooded hills frosty-feeling on the north slope of a damp, wooded 

 hillside. Now, suddenly, the hepaticas are in bloom. All 

 winter there were the pui-jjle-red hepatica leaves from last year, standing 

 above the dead oak leaves, or buried under snow, to mark where the 

 hepatica plants lived in waiting for the first inkling of spring. Unlike 

 so many of the earliest flowers whose plants stand only a little while 

 above the earth while they bloom, make seeds, and send food into the 

 roots, the hepatica is visible all the year round. Curled down at the base 

 of the plant, from which spread the long-stemmed, three-lobed, purplish 

 old leaves, there are grey, silky-furry, new leaves tightly folded and curled 

 together ahove the flower buds on their silky stems. In an incredibly- 

 short time after the ground has thawed and the sun shows more strength 

 than it had in February, the flower stalks extend themselves and the buds 

 open in the weak sunshine. Lavender, pink, white, and all variations of 

 these colors, decorated with a whorl of white stamens in the center, the 

 hepatica flowers are among the most charming to be found in the woods. 

 John Burroughs said of the hepaticas in his New England woods: 

 "There are many things left for ^lay, but nothing fairer, if as fair, as 

 the flrst flower, the hepatica. What an individuality it has! No two clus- 

 ters alike; all shades and sizes. A solitary bhu'-{)urple one, fully expanded 

 and rising over the brown leaves or the green moss, its cluster of minute 

 anthers showing like a gi'oup of pale stars on its little firmament, is 

 enough to arrest and hold the dullest eye.'' 



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