A YEAR IN THE FIELDS 



Put your nose to every flower you pluck, 

 and you will be surprised how your list will 

 swell the more you smell. I plucked some 

 wild blue violets one day, the ovata variety 

 of the sagittate^ that had a faint perfume of 

 sweet clover, but I never could find another 

 that had any odor. A pupil disputed with 

 his teacher about the hepatica, claiming in 

 opposition that it was sweet-scented. Some 

 hepaticas are sweet-scented and some are 

 not, and the perfume is stronger some 

 seasons than others. After the unusually 

 severe winter of 1 880-81, the variety of 

 hepatica called the sharp-lobed was markedly 

 sweet in nearly every one of the hundreds 

 of specimens I examined. A handful of 

 them exhaled a most delicious perfume. 

 The white ones that season were largely in 

 the ascendant ; and probably the white 

 specimens of both varieties, one season with 

 another, will oftenest prove sweet-scented. 

 Darwin says a considerably larger propor- 

 tion of white flowers are sweet-scented than 

 of any other color. The only sweet violets 

 I can depend upon are white, Viola blanda 

 and Viola Canadensis, and white largely 

 predominates among our other odorous wild 

 flowers. All the fruit-trees have white or 



210 



