: This Then is Upland Pastures Being some out-door essays dealing with the beautiful things that the spring and summer bring by Knapp Adeline - Natural history Outdoor books; American essays 19th century

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THIS THEN IS UPLAND PASTURES

BEING SOME OUT-DOOR ESSAYS DEALING WITH THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT THE SPRING AND SUMMER BRING ? ? ?

Done into a book at the Roycroft Printing Shop in East Aurora, New York

Copyrighted by The Roycroft Printing Shop 1897

When the warm rains succeed winter's driving downpours, and the young grass begins to mantle the meadows ? with tender green, is the time, of all the year, to be out of doors ? All the woodsy places are cool and dripping and dim and delicious. A month later they will be not less beautiful, perhaps, but less approachable. The things of Nature grow sophisticated as the season advances. In the early springtime they are frank and confiding, and willingly tell the secrets of their growth to him who asks ? They have time, in these first beginnings of things, for friendly sociability: to show their tiny roots and bulbs, and let us study the delicate, gracious unfoldings of leaf and bud and blossom. In a few weeks they will all be too busy, keeping up with the season's swift march, to stop and visit with the lovingest of human friends.

Do we forget, from springtime to springtime, how lovely will be the year's awakening? Each winter of our discontent I think that I remember, as my longing imagination looks forward, the tender charm of the springtime wonder, yet with each recurring year it comes to me as a new and unknown joy ?

The whole world seems to welcome the new year-child. Even before the first growths appear there is a hushed awareness throughout Nature that moves the heart to thankfulness and remembered expectation ? The hope of springtime comes without stint, and without fail, bringing each one of us the message his heart is prepared to receive, and quickening our purest, least sordid impulses. The best that is in us seems possible, in the springtime. Who of us does not then dream that this best will yet gain strength to withstand the heat and drouth of summer's fierce searching? We turn to Mother Nature like children who long to be good. The worshipping instinct that lies deep within each soul goes out to her, vesting her in that personality which we have long since pronounced unthinkable when applied to God. There is a suggestion in the situation that is not without a certain saving humor to relieve it from grotesqueness. We are not far from a personal god when we send our souls out in loving contemplation of personified Nature, yet we still go on asking if God is, and if He is Truth. Whom do we ask, and why does the question rise? If God is Truth, He must be universal; and to be perceived by each soul for himself ? If, then, I perceive him not, either He is not the truth or else I am simple and sincere in desiring the truth. If He is not the truth, do I then desire human persuasion that He is? Or, if I am not simple and sincere, who can make me so?

Nature will help us if we turn to her. We have filled our lives so full of complexities and problems that it is well for us to have her annual reminder that even without our taking thought about it the real world, that will be here when we, with all our busyness, shall have passed from sight, has renewed itself, and stands bidding us come and find peace.

For Nature keeps open house for us, and even when we visit her and leave a trail of dust and desolation behind us, like the stupid, untidy children we are, she only sets herself, with the silent, persistent patience of her age-wise motherhood, to cover and remove it. Down in the canyon, this morning, among the trillium and loosestrife and wild potato, I found the inevitable tin can left by some picnicker to mar and desecrate the landscape, but now completely filled with soft brown mold, and growing in it a mass of happy green wood-sorrel ?

This is better than going at things with a broom, gathering them up and removing them from one place to another, which is about as far as we humans have progressed in our science of cleaning up ? I was glad to welcome the trillium. How one loves its quaint old name of wake-robin, fitting title for this first harbinger of spring, that comes to us even before the robin's note is heard. Many of our common wild-flowers have several names, but there is none with such invariably pretty ones as all ages have united in bestowing upon wake-robin. Birth-root, our forefathers called it, seeing the birth of the new year in its early blossoming, and how many generations have known it as the trinity-flower! But 'tis best known, I think, as wake-robin, and the very breath of spring is in the name.

A member of the great lily family is wake-robin ? It loves damp, shady places and moist, rich valleys. On the Pacific Coast we do not find the typical Eastern variety, but we have a variety of our own, tho' unmistakably wake-robin. Its color varies from rich madder-red to pale-pink, sometimes almost white. It grows from a thick, tuber-like root, and the calyx has, surrounding its three red petals and three green sepals, three broad, mottled-green leaves which, for some unaccountable reason, our florists remove when they offer the flower for sale. A strange whimsy, this. The poor blossoms, thus denuded, have a bewildered, self-conscious air, such as may have been worn by the little egg-selling woman of old, who awoke from her nap by the king's highway to find her petticoats shorn. Well may wake-robin thus question its own identity. It is no longer the trillium of the forest: it is only the trillium of commerce, a sad, unlovely object ?

A bank where wake-robin lifts its bonny head is always fair to see. The plant has certain boon companions always sure to be close at hand. The Solomon's seal is one of these, its roots bearing to this day the round marks imagined by the early foresters to be none other than the seal of Solomon, the son of David, ? There is no more exquisite green than the beautiful, shining leaves of this plant, with its tiny white bells of flowers. It has a near relative almost always growing near it, that, with singular paucity of imagination, our botanists have called "False Solomon's Seal."

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