

TV^^ 



THE 



BOTANIST. 



Vol. I. 



BINGHAMTON, N. Y., JANUARY i, 1891. 



No. I. 



THE HEPATICA OR LIVERWORT. 



{ffepatica triloba.) 

 BY WILLABD N. CLUTE, BINGHAMTON, N. V. 



Many people who do not know the summer 

 flowers by name, are well acquainted with the 

 names and haunts of our early spring flowers. 

 The reason for this lies in the fact that there 

 are but few people who do not make at least 

 one trip to the woods each spring. In summer, 

 wUd-flowers are forgotten in the abundance of 

 other attractions; but when the last snow-drifts 

 of a long winter are slowly melting in the rav- 

 ines, young and old delight to go afield once 

 more in search of the delicate harbingers of 

 spring, the flowers. 



On such rambles one's attention is sure to be 

 engaged by the hepatica, one of the most inter- 

 esting, as well as the earliest, of spring blossoms. 

 It grows abundantly in nearly every deciduous 

 wood from Canada to Georgia and west to 

 Wisconsin, being as well known as the robin or 

 Hue-bird, whose appearance, in the Northern 

 States, scarcely ante-dates its first blossom. 



But the hepatica takes an unfair advantage of 

 the birds, beginning its preparations for spring 

 while that season is yet many months away. 

 In autumn, as one walks through the wood- 

 lands and notes the absence of the flowers, 

 he little suspects that the woods are full of 

 spring flowers ; and yet the hepaticas are fully 

 developed, and, in the earth at his feet, wait 

 only for a few warm days next spring to call 

 them forth. 



The first hepaticas appear on the warm south- 

 em slopes, but as the season advances they 

 spring up by handfulls every- where in the woods. 

 New leaves do not appear till the blossoms 

 have faded, and as the old ones are usually 

 covered with fallen leaves, the flowers, pushing 



up, each one on a downy scape, forms a strik- 

 ing picture. 



The majority of the blossoms are of some 

 shade of blue but there are also pink and white 

 ones. It is an interesting fact that this flower 

 has no corolla. What we call the corolla is a 

 circle of colored sepals, an involucre of three 

 green bracts answering to the calyx. The sepals 

 vary in number from six to twenty or more. 

 After they have fallen the bracts surround the ■ 

 seed till it ripens. 



It is not generally known that the hepatica is 

 occasionally fragrant, but John Burroughs, writ- 

 ting of fragrant wild-flowers in his book "Pep- 

 acton " says : "Group after group may be 

 inspected ranging through all shades of purple 

 and blue, wtih some perfectly white, and no 

 odor be detected, when presently you will hap- 

 pen upon a little brood of them that have a 

 most delicate and delicious fragrance. " It 

 would be interesting to know whether this 

 fragrance is constant in the same plant. 



The leathery, three lobed, evergreen leaves of 

 the hepatica are curiously mottled and blotched 

 with reddish green, which deepens, in color, 

 with age. The young leaves grow erect but at 

 length spread flat on the ground. The shape 

 of the lobes has given rise to two sub-species 

 — the acute, and obtuse lobed. The former is 

 said to be most common, north, and prefers the 

 north sides of hills ; the latter prefers southern 

 slopes. 



The hepatica will bloom in the house with 

 scarcely any care. If the plant is dug up at 

 any time from September to March and placed 

 in a flower-pot in a sunny window, the flower- 

 buds will shoot up so rapidly that one can 

 almost see them grow. In this way one may 

 have flowers all winter long for the slight 

 trouble of digging them up. When the flowers 



