This is one of the daintiest of our wild plants. You find the woods
carpeted with it in early spring.
The flower has six delicate white sepals. These are long and rather
narrow, and on the outside they are often tinged with purple or pink.
The buds are usually quite pink until they open. These pink sepals form
the calyx. There are no petals.
Within the pink sepals are many stamens with little yellow heads set on
stems as fine as a hair, and in the centre of these stamens there is a
small green knot of seeds.
The Wood Anemone has two kinds of green leaves. The flower grows on a
short, smooth stalk, which rises from the centre of three soft, dark
green leaves. These leaves are each divided into three parts, which are
deeply cut up round the edge, and their short stalks are covered with
fine hairs.
The second leaves rise on slender stalks straight from the root. They
are divided very much the same as the others. If you dig up the Wood
Anemone root you find that it is like a rough brown bit of stick. It
creeps along underneath the ground instead of going straight down into
it, and you can see that the flower and the first set of three leaves
rises at a different part from the stalk which bears the other leaves.