A Naturalist at Large by Holmes Rolston III The Pasqueflower Natural History 88 No. 4, April, 1979, pp. 6-16 “ The chance to find [one]," wrote A Ido Leopold, "is a right as inalienable as free speech" Earliest among the rites of the west­ in and against the wild. So I venture this biological phenomenon becomes a ern spring is the blossoming of the here to let the meeting of it take a philo­ metaphor for all the striving toward pasqueflower, which, like the eastern sophical turn. fruition that characterizes the psycho­ arbutus, precedes by a month the rest Winter in the Rockies is too much logical, intellectual, cultural, and even of the vernal flora. Its precocious a still and lifeless scene, save for, or the spiritual levels of life. beauty accounts for its name, a flower yet more truly because of, the howling Flowering adds the splendor of art of the Pasque, Easter; and its loveli­ wind. The beauty is of icy peaks, glis­ to our often rather more mean thoughts ness, size, and season led Aldo tening snowfields, crystalline flakes, concerning the evolution of life, for the Leopold to introduce his Sand County gaunt aspen, the somber hues of li­ flowers in the jungle fit their bearers for Almanac with the plea that “the chens on weathered granite. The sea­ survival and yet also reveal how life chance to find a pasqueflower is a right sonal green is gone, and only the coni­ pushes toward a level of living beauty as inalienable as free speech.” Re­ fers preserve it with dark coolness, that exceeds all precedent in the non­ cently, just after the equinox, hiking a their branches pruned back by the flowering wilderness. We love the meadow in the foothills of the Rockies, weight of the snows. Winter is all of landscape, the sunset, the night sky; I delighted in thousands in finest frozen beauty, Mother Nature hiber­ yet greatly exceeding the geophysical, bloom, with nothing else out save the nates; by the time of the equinox we mineralogical, and celestial ranges of aspen catkins. tire and hope for the “ spring” of life. beauty.are those of the emergent struc­ Its finding is a joy immediately in the The pasqueflower symbolizes all tures of life, particularly as these come aesthetic encounter, but beyond that, that is missing in the wintry landscape, to their botanical apogee in the flowers this windflower is a cherished symbol and should there come a spring without of the higher plants, which so marvel­ of the wild for reasons that run deeper. the regeneration it prefigures, the ously combine function and beauty, as In its annual renewal as the first spirited winter would have grown lethal. though to mark life’s reproduction with flowering against the blasts of winter, Wildness without its flora would be a special sign. it is a sign against the eternal storm. only the bleak and conquering storm, Other plants flower more simply, as Like the daffodil in Shakespeare’s and it is this florescence that the pasque­ with the hundred thousand aspen cat­ England, the pasqueflower dares to flower helps us to celebrate because kins that I passed with the thousands “ take the winds of March with it dares to bloom when the winter of of pasqueflowers, but even these wind- beauty,” and such a brave flower can which we have wearied is not yet gone. pollinated flowers or the ferns and help us ponder what it means to live “ Flowering” touches values so soon; mosses, which do not properly flower at all, still bear reproductive structures that, when looked at more nearly, amply enrich the phenomenon of flo­ rescence. Flowering, whether great or small, is a many-splendored thing, cir­ cling round the pageant of life that per­ ennially springs from the latent earth. The brilliance of this pasqueflower has its simplest explanations in mecha­ nisms for flowering so soon at the winter’s end. It must have petals (or, as the botanists prefer, petallike sepals) large enough to attract the few insects that are out so early. The downy sur­ face of transparent hairs on its palmate leaves and stem insulates and also, as do those of the pussy willows, allows a radiation heating to temperatures high enough for development, provid­ ing a miniature greenhouse effect. The same coat probably also protects the pasqueflower from unneeded radia­ tion, although it needs much light and cannot grow in the shade, and the hairs help in its water economy. The energy stored in its root system The pasqueflower, too, when it passefleur, passe being but a half- is drawn upon for its spring growth, bursts forth with the breaking up of the translated form of Pasch, going back and the hollow stem seems to permit raging winter, is such a reminder of through the Greek pascha to the He­ its rapid growth and to allow both its life’s survival, indeed of a prospering brew pesach. bending before the wind and a turning such that it hopes for paradise. After Whatever its antiquity, we might of its floral head to face the spring sun. the flood, the winter, this earth will first think, that association has no natu­ By the last adaptation it gains enough always come round again to its garden ral basis; it is entirely fictional. But we solar energy to keep the floral parts season, to bring us somehow nearer to later find connections that are so funda- operating efficiently. Its sap has a low its ultimate natural significance, even mental—biologically, psycholog­ freezing point, and all its parts are to the sacred character of life in its ically, and even theologically—that soaked with an acrid irritant, which struggling beauty. We begin to see we are hardly aware of them. It is no discourages foraging deer and elk. why it is so inalienable a right to be coincidence that Easter comes with the This rose has its poison thorns. able to find in the dusty earth this draft spring; the energies of Easter belong This is survival through winter, to be of beauty. with the energies of spring. The vernal sure, but the pasqueflower helps me to The natural character that we now lily is more than an artificial symbol, glimpse something more, the skill of celebrate comes through even its scien­ it is a natural emblem of life springing art superimposed on the science of sur­ tific name, Pulsatilla patens. It is “ sha­ up anew out of a wintry death, and so vival. This is exuberance in the funda­ ken” (pulsatus) by the incessant too with those other symbols of life’s mental, etymological sense of being winds, and of diminutive form ( ilia), reproductive powers—lambs, eggs, more than expectedly luxuriant. Does while yet “ spreading broadly” rabbits, and even the ladies parading in not such an encouraging beauty speak (patens) its brandished petals. John their fetching dresses and bonnets— of that face of nature that overleaps the Gerard wrote in his 1597 Herbal that that sometimes seem so flippant beside merest hanging on to life to bear the the “ passe floure is called commonly the sobriety of the grave and the hope winds of the storm with vigorous, in Latine Pulsatilla.” Botanists have for more. adorning beauty? Nor is it just the often placed Pulsatilla in the genus The death of Jesus was not inciden­ grand petals of delicate purple whorled Anemone, that genus going back to the tally at the Passover, and centuries about the yellow stamens and pistils, Greek word for “ windflower,” but later, the missionary church, moved by for the fingered involucre frames the most prefer to separate it out owing to forces it did not wholly understand, su­ flower so well, and the villous coat has the tails of the achenes, which become perimposed its annual memorial of the a sheen that, seen backlighted by the so greatly elongated as it sows those new covenant onto the “ pagan” rites sun, gives a lustrous aura to comple­ villous seeds on the very winds that of spring that preceded Christianity in ment the gentle leafy green. blast it. Those wisps rising over the Europe. Easter is from an Indo-Euro- Butterflies drink its nectar, and if I prairie gave it another name—the ^pean root for the East, the rising sun, first reduce them to their pollinating prairie smoke. and the beloved Teutonic goddess function, 1 notice soon after their The winds have carried it virtually Eostre, whose holiday was celebrated winged beauty. The bees come too, around the north temperate world, for at the equinox. By a related insight, and I must look more closely again, to it is found in northern Europe, in the hardly less profound or subliminal, the find in their wing venation still further western two-thirds of North America, church matched its incarnation with the evidence of the art that emerges with and in the Siberian Orient. Further, winter solstice and the pagan rejoicing the architecture of life. As when we from some ancestral plant there have that the sun would begin its return strip the beauty from the melodies of evolved several closely related spe­ toward spring, this coinciding with the birds in spring or from human romantic cies. Pulsatilla is everywhere a flower birth of a Savior, love, laying bare only biochemical re­ that comes on the heels of winter and productive functions, so too here, per­ is without peer in its own environment. haps when the more is reduced to the No other flower is able so to endure the less, we refuse to let life’s production cold and, if need be, the dry, and to and rebirth become a window into spread its petals forth so boldly from life’s spirited inventiveness.