Some Spring Days in Iowa Part 1

Some Spring Days in Iowa.

by Frederick John Lazell.

FOREWORD

It is indeed a pleasure thus to open the gate while my friend leads us away from the din and rush of the city into "G.o.d's great out-of-doors."

Having walked with him on "Some Winter Days," one is all the more eager to follow him in the gentler months of Spring--that mother-season, with its brooding pathos, and its seeds stirring in their sleep as if they dreamed of flowers.

Our guide is at once an expert and a friend, a man of science and a poet.

If he should sleep a year, like dear old Rip, he would know, by the calendar of the flowers, what day of the month he awoke. He knows the story of trees, the arts of insects, the habits of birds and their parts of speech. His wealth of detail is amazing, but never wearying, and he is happily allusive to the nature-lore of the poets, and to the legends and myths of the woodland. He has the insight of Th.o.r.eau, the patience of Burroughs, and a nameless quality of his own--a blend of joyous love and wonder. His style is as lucid as sunlight, investing his pages with something of the simplicity and calm of Nature herself. The fine sanity and health of the man are in the book, as of one to whom the beauty of the world is reason enough for life, and an invitation to live well. He does not preach--though he sometimes stops to point to a forest vista, or a sunset, where the colors are melted into a beauty too fair and frail for this earth.

Let us hope that the author will complete his history of the seasons, and tell of us of Summer with its riot of life and loveliness, and of the Autumn-time with its pensive, dreamy beauty that is akin to death. He is a teacher of truth and good-will, of health and wisdom, of the brotherhood of all breathing things. Having opened the gate, I leave it open for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

JOSEPH NEWTON

CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA DECEMBER 1, 1908

APRIL--BUDS AND BIRD SONGS

IV. APRIL--BUDS AND BIRD SONGS

_"Has she not shown us all?

From the clear s.p.a.ce of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening Of April meadows?"_

_"And whiles Zeus gives the sunshine, whiles the rain."_

A strong southeast wind is blowing straight up the broad river, driving big undulations up the stream, counter to the current which, in turn, pushes at the base of the waves and causes their wind-driven crests to fall forward and break into spray. The whole surface of the river is flecked with these whitecaps, a rare sight on an inland stream but characteristic of April. We sit on a ledge of rock high up the slope of the canon and listen as they break, break, break. We may close our eyes and fancy we are with Edmund Danton in his sea-girt dungeon, or with Tennyson and his "cold, gray stones," or with King Canute and his flattering courtiers on the sandy sh.o.r.e. But a song sparrow with his recitative "Oleet, oleet, oleet," followed by the well-known cadenza, dispels the fancies and calls our attention to himself as he sits on a hop hornbeam and sings at half-minute intervals. The wind ruffles his sober coat of brown and gray and he looks like a careless artist, thrilling with the soul of song.

Notwithstanding the high wind there is a heavy haze through which the sun casts but faint shadows. Across the white-flecked river the emerald meadow rises in a mile long slope until it meets the sky in a mist of silver blue. To the right a big tract of woodland is haloed by a denser cloud of vivid violet as if the pillar of cloud which led the Israelites by day had rested there; or as if mingled smoke and incense were rising from Druid altars around the sacred grove. As a matter of fact, it is a mingling of the ever increasing humidity, the dust particles in the air and the smoke from many April gra.s.s fires. To the left of the meadow there is a sweep of arable land where disc harrows, seeders, and ploughs are at work. The unsightly corn stalks of the winter have been laid low, the brown fields are as neat and tidy as if they had been newly swept; and this is Iowa in April.

Up and down the river the willow leaves are just unfolding, bordering the stream with tender green. The ta.s.sels of the p.u.s.s.y willows, which were white in March, are now rosy and gold, due to the development of the anthers. The aspens at the front of the wood are thickly hung with the long yellowish-white ta.s.sels and look like ma.s.ses of floss silk among the tops of the darker trees. A big cottonwood is at its most picturesque period in the whole year. The dark red anthers make the myriads of catkins look like elongated strawberries. Tomorrow, or the next day, these red anthers will break and discharge their yellow pollen and then the ta.s.sels will be golden instead of strawberry-colored. Spring seems to unfold her beauties slowly but she has something new each day for the faithful.

The ash, the hackberry, the oaks, the linden, the locusts on the hill and the solitary old honey-locust down by the river's brink are as yet unresponsive to the smiles of spring. The plum, the crab apple, the hawthorn and the wild cherry are but just beginning to push green points between their bud scales. But the elms are a glory of dull gold; every twig is fringed with blossoms. The maples have lost their fleecy white softness, for the staminate flowers which were so beautiful in March have withered now. But the fruit blossoms remind us of Lowell's line, "The maple puts her corals on in May." In Iowa he might have made it April instead of May. But that would have spoiled his verse.

For long we sit and drink in the beauty of the scene. Meanwhile the birds on this wooded slope are asking us to use our ears as well as our eyes.

Such a mingling of bird voices! The "spring o' th' year" of the meadow larks and the mingled squeaks and music of the robins are brought up by the wind from the river bottom, and the shrill clear "phe-be" of the chickadee is one of the prettiest sounds now, just as it was in February.

Pretty soon a bevy of them come flitting and talking along, like a girl botany cla.s.s on the search. Before they have pa.s.sed out of sight the loud and prolonged "O-wick-o-wick-o-wick-o-wick" of the flicker makes us lift our eyes to the top of a scarlet oak and anon three or four of the handsome fellows alight nearer by so that we may the better admire their white-tailed coats, brown shoulders, scarlet napes and the beautiful black crescent on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. When we hear the call of the flicker we may know that spring is here to stay. They are as infallible as the yellow-breasted larks in the meadows.

"Chip-chip-chip-chip,"--yes, of course that's the chipping sparrow; another of the engaging creatures which almost has been driven from the habitations of his human friends by the miserable English sparrows. Often have we seen the little fellow set upon and brutally hurt by these pirates. Now he stays around rural homes, and his chestnut crown, brown coat mixed with black and gray, his whitish vest and black bill are always a welcome sight. He takes up the chant of the year where the departing junco left it off, throws back his tiny head and his little throat flutters with the oft-repeated syllable, continued rapidly for about four seconds. A while longer we wait and are rewarded by a few bars of the musicful song of the brown thrasher who has just arrived with Mrs.

Thrasher for two weeks of courtship and song, after which they will build a new home in the hazel thicket and go to housekeeping.

Just as we are rising to leave there is the glimmer of the blue-bird's wing and the brilliant fellow and his pretty mate appear at the top of the bank, where the staghorn sumac still bears its berries. None of the birds of the winter seems to care much for these berries but the bluebirds evidently love them. As another instance of their tastes in this direction may be mentioned the fact that for the past three weeks a pair of blue birds have made many visits every day to a Chinese matrimony vine, by the dining room window of the writer's home. This vine, as everyone knows, has a wreath of juicy red berries in the fall, which hang through the winter and are dried, but still red, in the spring. It was the first week of March when the family first heard the pleasing notes of the blue bird outside the window at breakfast time, and saw the brilliant male sitting on a post on the back lawn and his less brilliant, but equally attractive mate sitting on the clothesline. A little later and he flew to the vine, picked off one berry and ate it, took another one in his mouth and then returned to his post, while she followed his example. Both chirped and p.r.o.nounced the berries good, though up to that time the members of the household had supposed they were poisonous. After a few more bites of the morning meal the birds went all around the house, inspecting every nook and crevice. But they found every place fully occupied by the pestiferous English sparrows, who darted at them maliciously. For two whole days the blue birds stayed around the lawn and garden, but the sparrows made their lives miserable and finally they went to the timber an eighth of a mile away and selected an abiding place in the cavity of a ba.s.swood. But every morning and evening, sometimes many times during the day, they came for their meal of berries from the vine. Usually they were on hand as soon as the sun was up, and a more devoted and well behaved couple was never seen either in the bird or the human world.

We rise at length and walk along the wooded slope admiring new beauties at every step. Here is a thicket of wild gooseberry filled with dark green leaves and the tinkling notes of tree sparrows, and we hardly know which is the more beautiful. A little farther and we are in a tangle of pink and magenta raspberry vines from which the green leaves are just pushing out. The elder has made a great start; the yellowish-green shoots from the stems and from the roots are already more than six inches long.

The panicled dogwood and the red-osier dogwood (no, not the flowering dogwood) as yet show no signs of foliage, but the fine white lines in the bark of the bladdernut, which have been so attractive all winter, are now enhanced by the soft myrtle green of the tender young leaves. The shrubby red cedar is twice as fresh and green as it was a month ago, as it hangs down the face of the splintered rock where the farmer boys have set a trap to catch the mother mink. But Mrs. Mink is wary. Here is a pile of feathers, evidently from a wild duck, which seems to indicate that while the duck was making a meal of a fish which she had brought to sh.o.r.e, the mink pounced upon her and ate both duck and fish.

While we stand looking there is a slight movement among the roots of a silver maple at the river's brink. A moment later Mrs. Mink comes around the tree and towards us. She is about eighteen inches long, with a bushy tail about another eight inches, her blackish-brown body about as big round as a big man's wrist, and she has a "business-looking" face and jaw. Did you ever try to take the young minks from their nest in the latter part of April and did Mrs. Mink fight? She hasn't seen or smelled us yet, but suddenly when she is within seven feet of us, there is an upward movement of that supple, snakelike neck, a quick glance of those black diamond eyes, and she turns at right angles and dives into the river. A frog could not enter the water so silently.

We climb the slope again and pause in front of a big sugar maple, a rather rare sight hereabouts. The sap-sucker has bored a row of fresh holes in the bark of the tree and the syrup has flowed out so freely that the whole south side of the tree is wet with it. Scores of wasps, bees and flies of all sizes and colors are revelling in the sweetness.

Finally we come to where there is less gra.s.s but more dead leaves and leaf mould, and here is the first real herbaceous flower of this spring, the dwarf white trillium, or wake-robin. How beautiful it looks, its three pure, waxy-white petals, its six golden anthers and three long styles, and its pretty whorl of three ovate leaves, at the summit of a stem about four inches high. A little farther and we find a group of them and then other cl.u.s.ters, fresh and pure and sweet enough to make a bouquet for Euphrosyne.

Oh, but someone says, the hepatica is the first flower of spring; all the nature writers say so. Well, but they don't seem to say much about the trillium; possibly they haven't found it so often. Indeed, it seems to be more choice of its location. It is hardly ever, perhaps it would be safe to say never, found on a southern or a southwestern slope. Almost invariably it is found on the steep slope of a river bank, facing northeast or east. Hepaticas nearly always grow on the same slope, but they come into blossom about two days later than the trillium. But on another bank which faces the noon and the afternoon sun the hepaticas are up with the trilliums in the calendar of spring. This year the trillium was found blooming, on a northeastern slope, March 24. At this place the hepatica did not bloom until March 26. But it bloomed March 24, on a southwest slope, fifteen miles away.

By-the-way, the list of March blooming plants for 1908, is probably one of the longest for years: March 20, aspen; twenty-first, hazel and silver maple; twenty-third, p.u.s.s.y willow, prairie willow and white elm; twenty-fourth, dwarf white trillium and hepatica (also known as liverleaf, squirrelcup, and blue anemone); twenty-fifth, slippery elm, cottonwood; twenty-ninth, box elder and fragrant sumac; thirtieth, dandelion; thirty-first, Dutchman's breeches.

How some of these early flowers secure the perpetuation of their species is an interesting study for amateur botanists. In the case of the trillium the fruit is a three-lobed reddish berry, but one has to search for it as diligently as Diogenes did for an honest man before he finds it. The plant seldom sets seed in this vicinity, but seems to depend rather upon its tuber-like rootstocks in which the leaves lie curled all through the winter. The hepatica attracts pollen-feeding flies, female hive-bees and the earliest b.u.t.terflies, and is thus cross-fertilized to some extent; but it is thought also to be able to effect self-fertilization. In the case of the _hepatica acutiloba_, however, it has been found that staminate flowers grow on one plant and pistillate flowers on another, hence insects are essential to the perpetuation of this species.

After bringing us the trilliums and hepaticas in numbers, Nature pauses.

She means to give us time to inhale the fragrance of some of the hepaticas, and to learn that other hepaticas of the same species have no fragrance at all; that there is a variety of delicate colors, white, pink, purple, lavender, and blue; that the colored parts, which look like petals are really sepals; that they usually number six, but may be as many as twelve; that there are three small sessile leaves forming an involucre directly under the flower; that if we search we shall find some with four, more rare than four-leaved clovers; that the plant which was fragrant last year will also be fragrant this year; that the furry stems are slightly pungent,--enough to give spice to a sandwich; these preliminary observations fit us for more intricate problems later on.

Spenser, the divinely tongued, pictures April as a l.u.s.ty youth, riding upon the bull with the golden horns (_Taurus_), wading through a flood, and adorned with garlands of the fairest flowers and buds. A better figure would have been Europa riding Zeus. And Chaucer also makes April a masculine month:

_"When that Aprille with his schoweres swoote The drought of Marche had perced to the roote."_

But surely April, with her smiles anl[TN-1] tears, ought to be regarded as a feminine month. Ovid has shown that she was not named from _aperire_, to open, as some have supposed, but from Aphrodite, the Greek name for Venus, G.o.ddess of beauty and mother of love. She is chaste, even cold, but grows sweeter and more affectionate every day and her tears all end in smiles. Her flowers are pure and mostly white, fitting for a maiden. Look at the list (if the weather is warm):

White or whitish:--Rue-anemone, hepatica, spring beauty, blood-root, toothwort, Dutchman's breeches, dog's tooth violet, wild ginger, chickweed, Isopyrum, plantain-leaved everlasting, shepherd's purse, shad-bush, wild strawberry, whitlow-gra.s.s, wind-flower, hackberry (greenish white), false Solomon's seal, catnip, spring cress, wild black currant, wild plum.

Yellow or yellowish:--Marsh marigold, creeping b.u.t.tercup, marsh b.u.t.tercup, small-flowered crowfoot, dandelion, yellow woodsorrel, bell-wort, star-gra.s.s, downy yellow violet, pappoose root, lousewort, p.r.i.c.kly ash, hop hornbeam, white oak, mossy-cup oak, b.u.t.ternut, sugar maple.

Purple or blue:--Common blue violet, trillium (_recurvatum_ and _er.e.c.t.u.m_) hepatica, Virginian cowslip (_lung-wort_ or _bluebells_), woodsorrel, common blue phlox, ground plum.

Green:--The Indian turnip, and several of the sedges.

Pink:--Spring beauty, toothwort, dog's tooth violet, hepatica.

Scarlet:--Columbine.

From this list it ought to be plain that April is a dainty queen, wearing a dress of cheerful green, a bodice of white, with violets in her hands, pink in her cheeks, and a single scarlet columbine in her wealth of golden hair, which indeed comes nearly being the portrait of Dione herself. Or, as one of the poets has better described her:

_April stood with tearful face With violets in her hands, and in her hair Pale wild anemones; the fragrant lace Half-parted from her breast, which seemed like fair, Dawn-tinted mountain snow, smooth-drifted there._

In this long list of April flowers--some observers will be able to make it still longer--there are many favorites. The pretty rue-anemone recalls the tradition that Anemos, the wind, chose the delicate little flowers of this family as the heralds of his coming in early spring. And in the legend of Venus and Adonis the anemone is the flower that sprang from the tears of the queen as she mourned the death of her loved one. Theocritus put the wind-flowers into his Idylls, and Pliny said that only the wind could open them. The Spring beauty has as rich a legend, for it was the Indian Miskodeed, left behind when Peboan, the winter, the Mighty One, was melted by the breath of spring. The toothwort (_dentaria laciniata_) is sometimes known as the pepper-root, and every school boy and girl living near the woods is familiar with the taste of its tubers and the appearance of its cross-shaped flowers. The plumy dicentra, or Dutchman's breeches, seems so feminine as to be grossly misnamed until we remember that it was first discovered in the Rip Van Winkle country. The wild ginger with its two large leaves and its queer little blossoms close to the ground is another delight to the saunterer along the rocky slopes, where the feathery shad-bush--the aronia of Whittier--with its wealth of snowy blossoms and the wild plum not far away, with its ma.s.ses of pure white, are inspirations to clean and sweet lives, calling to mind the lines of Wordsworth: