I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, than my eyes were open for wild flowers. Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Certainly the land was not ablaze with color. In the grass about the old fort there was plenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping white houstonia; and from a crevice in the wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of goldenrod in full bloom. The reader may smile, if he will, but this last flower was a surprise and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod! Dr. Chapman’s Flora made no mention of such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked strangely anachronistic. I had never thought of them as harbingers of springtime. The truth did not break upon me till a week or so afterward. Then, on the way to the beach at Daytona, where the pleasant peninsula road traverses a thick forest of short-leaved pines, every tree of which leans heavily inland at the same angle (“the leaning pines of Daytona,” I always said to myself, as I passed), I came upon some white beggar’s-ticks—like daisies; and as I stopped to see what they were, I noticed the presence of ripe seeds. The plant had been in flower a long time. And then I laughed at my own dullness. It fairly deserved a medal. As if, even in Massachusetts, autumnal flowers—the groundsel, at least—did not sometimes persist in blossoming far into the winter! A day or two after this, I saw a mullein stalk still presenting arms, as it were (the mullein always looks the soldier to me), with one bright flower. If I had found that in St. Augustine, I flatter myself I should have been less easily fooled.
There were no such last-year relics in the flat-woods, so far as I remember, but spring blossoms were beginning to make their appearance there by the middle of February, particularly along the railroad—violets in abundance (Viola cucullata), dwarf orange-colored dandelions (Krigia), the Judas-tree, or redbud, St. Peter’s-wort, blackberry, the yellow star-flower (Hypoxis juncea), and butterworts. I recall, too, in a swampy spot, a fine fresh tuft of the golden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix—a plant that I had never seen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod “hollow” full of the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter’s-wort, a low shrub, thrives everywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especially attractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers—not unlike the St. John’s-wort—do something to enliven the general waste. The butterworts are beauties, and true children of the spring. I picked my first ones, which by chance were of the smaller purple species (Pinguicula pumila), on my way down from the woods, on a moist bank. At that moment a white man came up the road. “What do you call this flower?” said I. “Valentine’s flower,” he answered at once. “Ah,” said I, “because it is in bloom on St. Valentine’s Day, I suppose?” “No, sir,” he said. “Do you speak Spanish?” I had to shake my head. “Because I could explain it better in Spanish,” he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went on in perfectly good English: “If you put one of them under your pillow, and think of some one you would like very much to see—some one who has been dead a long time—you will be likely to dream of him. It is a very pretty flower,” he added. And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to my thinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (Rubus trivialis). With them I fairly fell in love: true white roses, I called them, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautiful as the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found on the summit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a Rubus, though Dr. Gray’s key led me to that genus again and again. There is something in a name, say what you will.
Some weeks later, and a little farther south—in the flat-woods behind New Smyrna—I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself staring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common Iris versicolor of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a pool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger and taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went through the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my return at noon. In similar places grew a “yellow daisy” (Leptopoda), a single big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. It seemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but I could not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Beside the railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, and a dainty blue lobelia (L. Feayana), with once in a while an extremely pretty coreopsis, having a purple centre, and scarcely to be distinguished from one that is common in gardens. No doubt the advancing season brings an increasing wealth of such beauty to the flat-woods. No doubt, too, I missed the larger half of what might have been found even at the time of my visit; for I made no pretense of doing any real botanical work, having neither the time nor the equipment. The birds kept me busy, for the most part, when the country itself did not absorb my attention.
More interesting, and a thousand times more memorable, than any flower or bird was the pine barren itself. I have given no true idea of it, I am perfectly aware: open, parklike, flooded with sunshine, level as a floor. “What heartache,” Lanier breaks out, poor exile, dying of consumption—“what heartache! Ne’er a hill!” A dreary country to ride through, hour after hour; an impossible country to live in, but most pleasant for a half-day winter stroll. Notwithstanding I never went far into it, as I have already said, I had always a profound sensation of remoteness; as if I might go on forever, and be no farther away.
Yet even here I had more than one reminder that the world is a small place. I met a burly negro in a cart, and fell into talk with him about the Florida climate, an endless topic, out of which a cynical traveler may easily extract almost endless amusement. How about the summers here? I inquired. Were they really as paradisaical (I did not use that word) as some reports would lead one to suppose? The man smiled, as if he had heard something like that before. He did not think the Florida summer a dream of delight, even on the east coast. “I’m tellin' you the truth, sah; the mosquiters an' sand-flies is awful.” Was he born here? I No; he came from B——, Alabama. Everybody in eastern Florida came from somewhere, as well as I could make out. “Oil, from B——,” said I. “Did you know Mr. W——, of the—— Iron Works?” He smiled again. “Yes, sah; I used to work for him. He’s a nice man.” He spoke the truth that time beyond a peradventure. He was healthier here than in the other place, he thought, and wages were higher; but he liked the other place better “for pleasure.” It was an odd coincidence, was it not, that I should meet in this solitude a man who knew the only citizen of Alabama with whom I was ever