190 PEP ACTON 



violet of our Northern woods — was odorless, till 

 a correspondent called my attention to the contrary 

 fact. On examination I found that, while the first 

 ones that bloomed about May 26 had very sweet- 

 scented foliage, especially when crushed in the 

 hand, the flowers were practically without fragrance. 

 But as the season advanced the fragrance developed, 

 till a single flower had a well-marked perfume, and 

 a handful of them was sweet indeed. A single 

 specimen, plucked about August 1, was quite as fra- 

 grant as the English violet, though the perfume is 

 not what is known as violet, but, like that of the 

 hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of certain fruit- 

 trees. 



It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of 

 our sugar maple are sweet-scented; the perfume 

 seems to become stale after a few days: but pass 

 under this tree just at the right moment, say at 

 nightfall on the first or second day of its perfect 

 inflorescence, and the air is loaded with its sweet- 

 ness; its perfumed breath falls upon you as its cool 

 shadow does a few weeks later. 



After the linnaea and the arbutus, the prettiest 

 sweet-scented flowering vine our woods hold is the 

 common mitohella vine, called squaw-berry and par- 

 tridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin flow- 

 ers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a 

 most agreeable fragrance. 



Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the 

 European, and many of ours are fragrant. The 

 first to bloom in the spring is the showy orchis, 



