Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

But the rest of the hypatica bed was utter desolation here where every year my earliest, my prettiest flowers came up and bloomed for me, was now a mass of coffee grounds, thrown, there in the winter-time. Not one of the flowers were coming up, but a few on the edges. The prettiest, a deep blue, double variety, was killed as I stood ruefully looking at them, I thought of the place I had found them. I recalled the early April days that I had spent out at Covered Bridge, which was then a new and mysterious woods to me carefully digging up these little plants, bringing them home in baskets, and planting them just as carefully as I dug them up, and watering them whenever it was dry. Every spring then, when I could go out and see their little flowers turned upward, then I knew it was Spring.

On the other side of the walk some spring-beauties in bud, and nearby them some sharp thick shoots of solomon’s seal were, a greenish red, all of them reminders of days spent in the woods in early springtime. On I walked slowly, beneath the grape-arbor, scanning the ground for flowers. Here were some more hypaticas in bud, there were some spring-beauties and Lungwort.  These last plants were the first ones I had ever seen. It was three or four years ago. Fred and I were walking along the creek one warm Saturday in May, when he suddenly espied