Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen and PG Distributed
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In Cuba there is a blossoming shrub whose multitudinous crimson flowersare so seductive to the humming-birds that they hover all day around it,buried in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first upright,the gorgeous bells droop downward, and fall unwithered to the ground,and are thence called by the Creoles "Cupid's Tears." Frederika Bremerrelates that daily she brought home handfuls of these blossoms to herchamber, and nightly they all disappeared. One morning she looked towardthe wall of the apartment, and there, in a long crimson line, thedelicate flowers went ascending one by one to the ceiling, and passedfrom sight. She found that each was borne laboriously onward by a littlecolorless ant much smaller than itself: the bearer was invisible, butthe lovely burdens festooned the wall with beauty.
To a watcher from the sky, the march of the flowers of any zone acrossthe year would seem as beautiful as that West-Indian pageant. Thesefrail creatures, rooted where they stand, a part of the "still life" ofNature, yet share her ceaseless motion. In the most sultry silence ofsummer noons, the vital current is coursing with desperate speed throughthe innumerable veins of every leaflet; and the apparent stillness, likethe sleeping of a child's top, is in truth the very ecstasy of perfectedmotion.
Not in the tropics only, but even in England, whence most of our floralassociations and traditions come, the march of the flowers is in anendless circle, and, unlike our experience, something is always inbloom. In the Northern United States, it is said, the active growth ofmost plants is condensed into ten weeks, while in the mother-country thefull activity is maintained through sixteen. But even the English winterdoes not seem to be a winter, in the same sense as ours, appearing morelike a chilly and comfortless autumn. There is no month in the yearwhen some special plant does not bloom: the Coltsfoot there opensits fragrant flowers from December to February; the yellow-floweredHellebore, and its cousin, the sacred Christmas Rose of Glastonbury,extend from January to March; and the Snowdrop and Primrose often comebefore the first of February. Something may be gained, much lost, bythat perennial succession; those links, however slight, must make thefloral period continuous to the imagination; while our year gives apause and an interval to its children, and after exhausted October haseffloresced into Witch-Hazel, there is an absolute reserve of blossom,until the Alders wave again.
No symbol could so well represent Nature's first yielding in spring-timeas this blossoming of the Alder, this drooping of the tresses of thesetender things. Before the frost is gone, and while the newborn season isyet too weak to assert itself by actually uplifting anything, it can atleast let fall these blossoms, one by one, till they wave defiance tothe winter on a thousand boughs. How patiently they have waited! Men areperplexed with anxieties about their own immortality; but these catkins,which hang, almost full-formed, above the ice all winter, show no suchsolicitude, but when March wooes them they are ready. Once relaxing,their pollen is so prompt to fall that it sprinkles your hand as yougather them; then, for one day, they are the perfection of grace uponyour table, and next day they are weary and emaciated, and their littlecontribu