Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

April 6th, 1903. Great white-heart cherry trees drifted with snow of blossoms and pelting the passer-by with flying flakes of petals. The buckeye tree, the great horse-chestnut, is a huge candelabrum of leafbuds, each bud a point of fragrant bronze infolding pale gold, a compact and imprisoned flame, gummy and glistening with spring and sap in the sunlight of early April. The balsam-pungent smell of the leaf-cusps of the cottonwoods resembles spice blown from the lattices of oriental harems. Not "blossom by blossom" does spring begin here, but with a rush, a very tempest of blossoms. Gill-over-the-ground, dentaria, starwort, golden corydalis, mettensia, celandine, trillium, wake-robin

and bluet, regiment on regiment, host on host, literally storm the bewildered woodlands with their blossoms. High among them, like a purple oriflamme, flutter the violet clusters of the Jacob's-ladder.