Spring re-creation

April 28.

Are not the flowers which appear earliest in the spring the most primitive and simplest?

In this town thus far as I have observed the earliest to flower this spring, putting them down in order, 

• the first six are decidedly water or water-loving plants, and 
• the l0th, 13th, and 14th were found in the water and are equally if not more confined to that element. 
• The 7th and 8th belong to the cooler zones of the earth; 
• the 7th, comes on burnt lands first and will grow in dry, cool, dreary places. 
• The 9th on a dry, warm rocky hillside,-- also the 18th; 
• the 11th and 12th in cold, damp gardens, like the earth first made dry land; 
• the 15th and 17th on dry (scantily clad with grass) fields and hills, hardy; 
• the 16th, sunny bare rocks, in seams on moss, where also in a day or two the columbine will bloom. 
• The 18th is also indebted to the warmth of the rocks.

This may, perhaps, be nearly the order of the world's creation.  Such were the first localities afforded for plants, water-bottoms, bare rocks, and scantily clad lands, and land recently bared of water.  

Thus we have in the spring of the year the spring of the world represented.  

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 28, 1852

We have in the spring of the year the spring of the world represented. See April 27, 1852 (" I find to-day for the first time the early saxifrage (Saxifraga vernalis) in blossom, growing high and dry in the narrow seams, where there is no soil for it but a little green moss. Following thus early after the bare rock, it is one of the first flowers, not only in the spring of the year, but in the spring of the world.”); February 11, 1854 (“[T]hey must have preceded other trees in the order of creation, as they precede them annually in their blossoming and leafing."); May 22, 1858 ("So was it also in a former geological age, when water and water-plants prevailed and before man was here to behold them. The sun was then reflected from the lily pad after the May storm as brightly as now.”); June 6, 1853 ("The spring, that early age of the world, following hard on the reign of water and the barren rocks yet dripping with it, is past.”)