The Spring of 1913 



Mary F. Barrett. 



One criterion of the earliness or lateness of a season is the time 

 of first flowering of its plants. An accurate determination of this 

 would involve a comparison in successive years of the dates of 

 blooming of a number of plants, the individual specimens examined 

 and the conditions under which they grew being always the same. 



A rough estimate, however, may be obtained from a school 

 flower calendar on which plants from a more or less limited area 

 are reported. The following results are summarized from the 

 spring calendar kept for the last five years by the students of the 

 State Normal School at Upper Montclair, New Jersey. From 

 the wild and cultivated flowers reported during that time fifty 

 were selected which answered to the following conditions: they 

 were located within a radius of thirty miles with Montclair as a 

 center, they blossomed before June ist, and they were reported 

 each year of the five, the reports being accompanied in most cases 

 by specimens of the blooms. A table was then made using the 

 year of 1909 as a basis and calculating for each flower in each the 

 number of days by which its bloom preceded or followed that of 

 1909. The results are as follows: 



19 10 was 7.7 days earlier than 1909, 



191 1 was 3 days later than 1909, 



191 2 was 4.6 days later than 1909, 



1 9 13 was 1 1.2 days earlier than 1909. 



The spring of 1913, then, appears to have been about two weeks 

 earlier than those of 19 12 and 191 1, about three days earlier than 

 1 9 10 and eleven days earlier than 1909. 



Editorial 



The suramer is passed and with it that period of recreation 

 when the average American devotes himself with some degree of 

 zest to rest and recuperation. The city, especially, turns with 

 pleasurable anticipation to the haunts of nature. Business 

 centers are more or less deserted, as people of means seek shore or 

 mountains, and even the dwellers in the poorer districts spend 

 pleasurable days in nearby picnic groves and parks. So all of 



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