Here, likewise, I found one
tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted with
rose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, when
he talks of wild flowers, has in his eye something different from these.
He is not thinking of any bush, no matter how beautiful, but of trailing
arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtooth
violets, spring beauties, "cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, columbine,
Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of that
bright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seen
covering his native hills and valleys with the return of May.
It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting in
Florida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especially
in the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two or
three sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place of
hepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as compared
with what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers," flowers which
it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little in
evidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. On
this pretty road out of Tallahassee--itself a city of flower gardens--I
can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms,
and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned.
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