Yellow and Orange 



Preferred Habitat— y[o\st woods or thickets near streams. 

 Flowering Season — August — December. 



Distribution — Nova Scotia and Minnesota, southward to the Gulf 

 States. 



To find a stray apple blossom among the fruit in autumn, 

 or an occasional violet deceived by caressing Indian Summer into 

 thinking another spring has come, surprises no one ; but when 

 the witch-hazel bursts into bloom for the first time in November, 

 as if it were April, its leafless twigs conspicuous in the gray 

 woods with their clusters of spidery pale yellov/ flowers, we 

 cannot but wonder with Edward Rowland Sill : 



" Has time grown sleepy at his post 

 And let the exiled Summer back ? 

 Or is it her regretful ghost, 

 Or witchcraft of the almanac ? " 



Not to the blue gentian but to the witch-hazel should Bryant 

 have addressed at least the first stanza of his familiar lines (p. ^'i). 

 The shrub doubtless gives the small bees and flies their last feast 

 of the season in consideration of their services in transferring 

 pollen from the staminate to the fertile flowers. Very slowly 

 through the succeeding year the seeds within the woody cap- 

 sules mature until, by the following autumn, when fresh flowers 

 appear, they are ready to bombard the neighborhood after the 

 violets' method, in the hope of landing in moist yielding soil far 

 from the parent shrub to found a new colony. Just as a water- 

 melon seed shoots from between the thumb and forefinger pinch- 

 ing it, so the large, bony, shining black, white-tipped witch- 

 hazel seeds are discharged through the elastic rupture of their 

 capsule whose walls pinch them out. To be suddenly hit in the 

 face by such a missile brings no smile while the sting lasts. 

 Witch-hazel twigs ripening indoors transform a peaceful living 

 room into a defenceless target for light artillery practice. 



Nowhere more than in the naming of wild flowers can we 

 trace the home-sickness of the early English colonists in America. 

 Any plant even remotely resembling one they had known at 

 home was given the dear familiar name. Now our witch-hazel, 

 named for an English hazel tree of elm lineage, has similar leaves 

 it is true, but likeness stops there ; nevertheless, all the folk-lore 

 clustered about that mystic tree has been imported here with the 

 title. By the help of the hazel's divining-rod the location of hid- 

 den springs of water, precious ore, treasure, and thieves may be 

 revealed, according to old superstition. Cornish miners, who live 

 in a land so plentifully stored with tin and copper lodes they can 

 have had little difficulty in locating seams of ore with or without 

 a hazel rod, scarcely ever sink a shaft except by its direction. 



303 



