Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the early
spring flowers, but I can recall the exquisite effect of the tender blue
hepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down
Broadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where the
cable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant must
find itself at home there. The water-pimpernel may now be seen, by any
sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of the
passing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars.
The reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs. Creevey’s book.
He knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my delight,
I am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in August. It is
a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be sought along
the shady stretches of Third Avenue, where the Elevated Road overhead
forms a shelter as of interlacing boughs. The arrow-head likes such
swampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at Dead Man’s Curve
and the corners of Twenty third Street. This is in flower now, and will
be till September; and St.-John’s-wort, which some call the false
goldenrod, is already here. You may find it in any moist, low ground, but
the gutters of Wall Street, or even the banks of the Stock Exchange, are
not too dry for it. The real golden-rod is not much in evidence with us,
for it comes only when summer is on the wane. The other night, however,
on the promenade of the Madison Square Roof Garden, I was delighted to
see it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in response to
the cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile there at the
base of a potted ever green. This lonely insect had no sooner sounded its
winter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically to wave and
droop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-side
pastures! But this may have been only a transitory response to the
cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he will
find golden-rod there every night. I believe there is always Golden Seal,
but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of “deep,
cool, moist woods,” where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing, along
with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and Dwarf
Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman’s breeches, and Pearlwort, and
Wood-sorrel, and Bishop’s--cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and
Snowberry, and Adder’s-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and
Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from some
fairy of genius. I should say it was a female fairy of genius who called
them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when she
invented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and slim,
pretty maids, and happy young wives. The author tells how they all look,
with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one would know how
they looked from their names; and when you call them over they at
once transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between our
sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations
whence other sky-scrapers are to rise.