Part II—Trees
I. Spring: "Rockaby Babies"
Where do you look for flowers in the Spring, and when? Why, on the ground, of course, and in late April or early May.
The Indian boy looked up, in March. He saw flowers much earlier than you do. The air is warmer than the ground in the early Spring. Before the snow goes off the red maple lights the edges of the woods and the banks of streams with its blood-red blossoms. Against the cold, gray-blue sky of March the maples look redder than they really are. The flowers are so small, and so crumpled and bunched in little tufts on the sides of twigs, that you may think them only the first leaves. Frost nips a good many of them. Entire clusters fall to the ground, sometimes on the snow. You can easily find and study them.
You will find a number of tiny blossoms snuggled together, inside a raincoat of varnished brown scales lined with wool. The separate flowers are fairy cups, some with pollen pockets on little hairs, like clappers in bells, and others with eager arms or plumes stretched out asking for pollen. It takes both kinds of flowers to make the winged seed of the maple, and they both grow on the same tree. The bees get their first sweet breakfasts of the year from the ruby honey cups of the red maple.
A week or two later, the Indian boy looked for the flowers of the rock or sugar maple. They are not so easy to see, from the ground, for flowers and leaves come together, and both are a pale yellowish green. The flowers are not bunched, and each cup hangs by a hair-like thread. The whole tree has a feathery, spring-like look that tells everyone who knows anything at all that the sweet sap is running up. The tree pumps up thirty or forty gallons of water in flowering time. The silver maple flowers early, too. Its blossoms are in thick short tufts of greenish white, much the color of the leaves. The flowers of all the maples grow on the sides of the twigs. The leaf-buds are at the ends.
