Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Celandine — Daffodils — Dog's-tooth violets — Anemones — Spring shrubs — Strength of flowers in bursting through the soil — Uses of frost. 'MARCH cometh in like a lion,' and 'March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers.' But however cold and blustering March may be, it is not merely a nursery for flowers to come in May ; it has abundance of flowers of its own, both in the fields and hedgerows and in the gardens. There are perhaps no more welcome flowers than the wild-flowers of March ; in the hedgerows are primroses and violets, and everywhere is the bright coltsfoot and the lesser celandine, certainly one of the brightest flowers of the year, and 'so called bycause that it beginneth to spring and to floure at the comming of the swallowes ' (Lyte). But for all its beauty and freshness, I cannot join in Wordsworth's well-known praises of it, for it is a sad weed in the garden, springing up everywhere and defying the neatest gardener. There are many more welcome wild-flowers, but I must leave them for the garden flowers. First, of course, come the many daffodils, which ever since the day of Perdita we have been taught to look on as the chief flowers of March. With the exception of the rose and lily, I suppose no flower has had so much written on it, and such loving praises given to it, as the daffodil or narcissus. From Homer downwards many a poet has so praised it, and few English poets have passed it by. Gower, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Herrick are among the early writers; and among the later writers I need only mention Wordsworth and Jean Ingelow, and I need do no more than mention the names. During the last twenty years the daffodils have been raised (or degraded t) to the rank of fashionable flowers, and much has been published about t...