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The yellow violet belongs only to the more northern sections, to high, cold, beechen woods, where the poet rightly places it; but in these localities, if you go to the spring woods every day, you will gather the hepatica first. I have also found the claytonia and the coltsfoot first. In a poem called "The Twenty-Seventh of March," Bryant places both the hepatica and the arbutus before it:
Another abundant flower in the Rock Creek region is the spring beauty. Like most others, it grows in streaks. A few paces from where your attention is monopolized by violets or arbutus, it is arrested by the claytonia, growing in such profusion that it is impossible to set the foot down without crushing the flowers.
A good sample of our native purslane is the claytonia, or spring beauty, a shy, delicate plant that opens its rose-colored flowers in the moist, sunny places in the woods or along their borders so early in the season.
One afternoon, last spring, I had been walking through a copse of young white birches, their leaves scarce yet apparent, over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty.
I had never before stood amid blooming claytonia, a flower of April, and looked down upon a field that held ripening strawberries. Every thousand feet elevation seemed to make about ten days' difference in the vegetation, so that the season was a month or more later on the top of the mountain than at its base.
Smaller plants, like the Trillium, the Houstonia, the Bloodroot, the Claytonia and the Hepatica, will work in charmingly in the foreground. Between them can be used many varieties of Fern, if the location is shaded somewhat, as it should be to suit the flowering plants I have named.
Here on the top of the mountain we overtook spring, which had been gone from the valley nearly a month. Red clover was opening in the valley below, and wild strawberries just ripening; on the summit the yellow birch was just hanging out its catkins, and the claytonia, or spring-beauty, was in bloom.
By this time the hepatica, anemone saxifrage, arbutus, houstonia, and bloodroot may be counted on. A week later, the claytonia or spring beauty, water-cress, violets, a low buttercup, vetch, corydalis, and potentilla appear. These comprise most of the April flowers, and may be found in great profusion in the Rock Creek and Piny Branch region.
In March, the vegetation was more than doubled in depth and color; claytonia, calandrinia, a large white gilia, and two nemophilas were in bloom, together with a host of yellow composite, tall enough now to bend in the wind and show wavering ripples of shade.
That pretty little Yankee weed, the claytonia, now common in parts of Lancashire and Oxfordshire, first made its appearance amongst us, I believe, by its seeds being accidentally included with the sawdust in which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport.
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