AN ARCADIAN CALENDAR 



A FLOWER of the day, humble, leafless, but of joyful 

 countenance, is colt's-foot, a flower well 

 A Witty known to the train traveller from the lavish 

 Flower way it spreads its gold on barren embank- 

 ments. It is a flower of wise wits. Blooming 

 betimes, it attracts the earliest insects, when there is no 

 competition from other flowers. It protects its stem by 

 warm scales. In rain, it has the wit to droop its head, 

 and shed the water. Ripening early, its twenty thousand 

 seeds have a good start in life. The cautious leaves appear 

 later, seemingly wrapped in cotton- wool, and grow to 

 the shape of a colt's foot, until ten inches across. They 

 have been used for centuries for the making of a 

 fragrant tobacco. 



FEBRUARY has several other flowers, like almond and 

 blackthorn, which bloom before the leaves 

 Precocious dare appear. Winter heliotrope, the Con- 

 Flowers tinental species of butterbur, which we have 

 naturalized in many lanes, is another flower 

 of the day ; and butterbur itself is among the precocious 

 ones, its flesh-coloured flower-heads being an attraction 

 to the first bees out of the hive. The generic name, 

 " petasites," refers to the children's delight in the vast 

 leaves, yet unborn, that will grow to be three feet across, 

 making excellent sunshades. 



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