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Updated: July 8, 2025
The Potomac and its tributaries squandered beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom.
Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows are deeply green, the trees are opening their tender leaves. In a burst of sunshine the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink, the hawthorns give a sweet smell. The air is full of sweetness; the world, of color. In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees.
Indeed, tradition is able to tell even now marvelous stories to travelers, and not long ago I was more amused than edified to hear an eloquent clergyman just returned from abroad tell how he had been shown the fruits of the Judas-tree, "in form like beautiful apples, fair to the eye, but within bitter and disappointing;" and he moralized just as vigorously on this fable as if it had been true, as he thought it.
At all times of the year it is beautiful; but perhaps best in early spring, when the highest mountains still have snow upon them and the neighbouring slopes are covered with tender green and white fruit blossom, and here the violet wistaria blooms and there the sombre crimson of the Judas-tree.
It is also the most usefully extended in range and scale; familiar in the height of the forest acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field bean and vetch and pea; familiar in the pasture in every form of clustered clover and sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all orders of plants.
And this suggestion, leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from in-doors to out-doors.
You've been on a woodland saunter, then, while I enacted Solomon's sluggard!" The worthy parent's eyes began to twinkle. "What flowers did you find? They have strange blooms here, and yet I warrant that even in these woods one might come across London pride and none-so-pretty and forget-me-not" His daughter smiled, and asked him some idle question about the May-apple and the Judas-tree.
Only a few feet, and the dogwood stars, the purple mist of the Judas-tree, the white fragrance of a wild cherry, came like a painted arras between them. For a time she could hear the movement of the branches as he put them aside; but presently this too ceased, and the place was left to her and to all the life that called it home.
Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows are deeply green, the trees are opening their tender leaves. In a burst of sunshine the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink, the hawthorns give a sweet smell. The air is full of sweetness; the world, of color. In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees.
The gravel creaked beneath their feet. "Madame Simonneau has forgotten to close the shutters again," said Ligny. Madame Simonneau was a woman from Neuilly, who came every morning to clean up. A large Judas-tree, leaning to one side, and to all appearance dead, stretched one of its round black branches as far as the portico.
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