18653 Study of Flowers 



In the over-long winter, snow lies heavy on the Flowers 

 Wyoming hills. With me as a boy the yearning for °/ 

 spring used to rise to a passion long before the ^^'^'"^ 

 swelling of the buds. The early flowers were a 

 constant joy, — the succulent spring beauty, dainty 

 rue-anemone, "half-venturing liverworts in furry 

 coats," bloodroot, wake-robins of three species — 

 red, white, and striped — the blue, white, and yellow 

 violets. Later came the blue phlox, pink and 

 fragrant azaleas, lobelias blue and scarlet, man- 

 drakes with their fruits "sweetish and nauseous, 

 eaten by pigs and boys," the tall meadow lilies, the 

 little laurels of the swamps and the big ones of the 

 clifi^s, and (perhaps most charming of all) fantastic 

 orchids in summer, and the blue fringed gentian in 

 the fall. Trailing arbutus, the first flower to greet 

 our fathers at Plymouth Rock, I never knew until 

 I went to Ithaca, for it is found only under the pines 

 on dry uplands and in maple districts like ours pines 

 grow only in swamps. 



Flowers I loved as flowers — that is, as things of interest 

 beauty — but I liked them the better because of '" 

 the appeal they made to my scientific curiosity ^^"^ 

 regarding their habits and locations, and (especially trees 

 in later years) their origins and relationships. Ac- 

 cordingly I enjoyed the little ones as well as the 

 big, and half a dozen little ones of difi^erent species, 

 even though not beautiful, meant more to me than 

 a hundred big ones all of a kind. A special proof of 

 scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is 

 to care for the hidden and insignificant. 



A love for trees went with my passion for flowers, 

 and the fact that our country exhibited several 

 wholly different types of forest never failed to hold 



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