Lesson Cl

The Crocus

Leading thought—The crocuses appear so early in the spring, because they have food stored in underground storehouses. They multiply by seeds and by corms.

Method—If it is possible to have crocuses in boxes in the schoolroom windows, the flowers may thus best be studied. Otherwise, when crocuses are in bloom bring them into the schoolroom, bulbs and all, and place them where the children may study them at leisure.

Observations—1. At what date in the spring have you found crocuses in blossom? Why are they able to blossom so much earlier than other flowers?

2. Take a crocus just pushing up out of its bulb. How many overcoats protect its leaves? What is at the very center of the bulb? Has the flower bud a special overcoat?

3. Describe the leaves. How are they folded in their overcoats? What color are they where they have pushed out above their overcoats? What color are they within the overcoats? Why?

4. Do the flowers or the leaves have stems, or do they arise directly from the bulb?

5. What is the shape of the open crocus flower? Can you tell the difference between sepals and petals in color? Can you tell the difference by their position? Or by their texture above or below? As you look into the flower, which make the points of the triangle, the sepals or the petals?

6. Describe the anthers. How long are they? How many are there? How do they open? What is the color of the pollen? Describe how a bee becomes dusted with pollen? Why does the bee visit the crocus blossom? If she finds nectar there, where is it?

7. Describe the stigma. Open a flower and see how long the style is? How do the sepals and petals unite to protect the style? Where is the seed-box? Is it so far down that it is below ground? How many seeds are developed from a single blossom?

8. How many colors do you find in the crocus flowers? Which are the prettiest in the lawn? Which, in the flower beds?

9. How do the crocus blossoms act in dark and stormy weather? When do they open? How does this benefit them?

10. How do the crocus bulbs multiply? Why do they lift themselves out of the ground and thus need resetting?

11. Describe how to raise crocuses best; the kind of soil, the time of planting, and the best situations.

Out of the frozen earth below,
Out of the melting of the snow,
No flower, but a film, I push to light;
No stem, no bud—yet I have burst
The bars of winter, I am the first
O Sun, to greet thee out of the night!

Deep in the warm sleep underground
Life is still, and the peace profound:
Yet a beam that pierced, and a thrill that smote
Call’d me and drew me from far away;
I rose, I came, to the open day
I have won, unshelter’d, alone, remote.

—“The Crocus,” by Harriet E. H. King.

When first the crocus thrusts its point of gold,
Up through the still snow-drifted garden-mould,
And folded green things in dim woods unclose
Their crinkled spears, a sudden tremor goes
Into my veins and makes me kith and kin
To every wild-born thing that thrills and blows.

—“A Touch of Nature,” by T. D. Aldrich.