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The flowers of the nut bush or hazel are easily seen, for they appear before the leaves are open. What we see to-day are often called catkins, but the name which country children give them is lambs'-tails. It is a very good name, too, for they are more like the tail of some tiny lamb than anything else. These catkins are yellowish-white in colour, and soft and almost woolly to the touch.
On the last "First-day" before their departure, she walked down the meadows to the lonely brake between the hills. It was the early spring, and the black buds of the ash had just begun to swell. The maples were dusted with crimson bloom, and the downy catkins of the swamp-willow dropped upon the stream and floated past her, as once the autumn leaves.
That afternoon as we journeyed through the pleasant land of France she was in holiday mood, and she forced all our spirits up to her level. It was calm, bright weather, the long curves of ploughland were beginning to quicken into green, the catkins made a blue mist on the willows by the watercourses, and in the orchards by the red-roofed hamlets the blossom was breaking.
But bees appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than for honey: their supply of this article, perhaps, does not keep as well as their stores of the latter; hence fresh bread, in the shape of new pollen, is diligently sought for. My bees get their first supplies from the catkins of the willows. How quickly they find them out!
That hair of a colour comparable only to that of the sweet gale when that sweet plant is in its golden withy or catkin stage in the month of May, and is clothed with catkins as with a foliage of a deep shining red gold, that seems not a colour of earth but rather one distilled from the sun itself.
He said it became her style; and he found such relief from his heavy thoughts in these harmless pleasantries that he kept on with them. He had involuntarily turned with her to walk back to her house on the way he had come, and he asked her if he might not carry her catkins for her.
The long, tassellated catkins, of a peculiar yellowish-green colour, render the plant one of much interest and beauty. As a wall plant it thrives well, the slight protection thus afforded favouring the growth and expansion of the catkins. For planting in the shrubbery it is also well suited, and where it oft-times attains to a height of 6 feet, and is bushy in proportion.
Both this and the following species, by reason of the resemblance between their female catkins and those of the Hop, and between their leaves and those of the Hornbeam, have acquired the very descriptive name of Hop Hornbeam. This is a large-growing tree, specimens in various parts of the country ranging in height from 50 feet to 60 feet. O. VIRGINICA. Virginian Hop Hornbeam.
I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur butterflies, with my own eyes; I admit the catkins, and the silver-notched palm; and I am told on good colour-authority that there is a lovely purplish bloom, almost like plum-bloom, over certain copses in the valley; by taking thought, I have observed the long horizontal arms of the beech growing spurred with little forked branches of spear-shaped buds, and I see little green nipples pushing out through the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf fir-trees.
In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The poet is greater than man: he is nature on two legs, ambulatory.
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