STUDIES OF PLANT LIFE 
SECTION I. 
WILD, OR NATIVE FLOWERS 
VIOLETS. 
“‘ The violet in her greenwood bower 
Where birchen boughs with hazel mingle, 
May boast herself the fairest flower 
In forest, glade or copsewood dingle.” 
—Scott. 
THERE is music and poetry in the very name—“ Violet.” 
In the forest wilderness, far removed from all our early 
home associations, the word will call up, unbidden, a 
host of sweet memories of the old familiar land where as 
children we were wont to roam among bowery lanes, and 
to tread the well-worn pathways through green pastures 
down by the hawthorn hedge, and along grassy banks 
where grew in early spring Primroses, Bluebells, and 
purple Violets. What dainty, sweet-smelling posies have 
you and I, dear reader (I speak to the emigrants from the 
dear Old Country), gathered on sunny March and April 
days on those green banks and grassy meadows? How 
many a root full of freshly opened Violets or Primroses 
have we joyfully carried off to plant in our own little bits 
of. garden ground, there to fade and wither beneath the 
glare of sunshine and drying winds. Little we heeded 
I 
