SPRING FLOWERS. 43 



ent from the light papery petals of the wood anemone or 

 the violet. This fleshiness is very well exemplified in 

 the hyacinth, the tulip, and the tiger-lily all of them 

 thick and stout blossoms, which flaunt their colors bold- 

 ly in the sunlight, and are little afraid of either wind 

 or rain. Throughout the whole of nature, 1 believe, 

 you will never find a brilliant mass of heavy bloom 

 on a strictly annual plant ; and all the more massive 

 forms are provided for beforehand by means of bulbs, 

 corms, or tubers. Such are the water-lilies, lotus, dah- 

 lias, orchids, iris, gladiolus, tuberose, arum, amaryllis, 

 fritillary, saffron, tulip, and almost all lilies. On the 

 other hand, whenever you find a single comparatively 

 inconspicuous plant among these families as, for exam- 

 ple, Solomon's seal, with its small drooping greenish- 

 white blossoms one is sure to find also that it is a bulb- 

 less annual. 



Nearly all the other very conspicuous flowers are 

 shrubby or arboreal in habit, and so get their working 

 capital from the store laid up in the stem by last year's 

 leaves : as in the case of the cherry, apple, hawthorn, 

 pyrus japonica, lilac, rose, laburnum, and all the great 

 tropical flowering trees. Is one of these ever flower until 

 after many years of foliage ; and if the flower-buds are 

 nipped off when the trees are young and first begin to 

 bud, more food -stuffs are laid by to produce finer heads 

 of bloom in later years. In the case of these alders here 

 (which, however, being wind-fertilized, need make no 

 special display), we can actually see where the catkins 

 come from ; for they were formed last autumn, and have 

 hung on the trees unopened through the whole winter, 

 so as to catch the very first chance of sunshine in the be- 

 ginning of spring. So far as my observation goes, very 

 few annuals or other unaided plants ever have conspicu- 



