Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) by Virginia Sorensen

know when to expect them."
    He made her cover up her eyes at the top of the hill and led her along an old lumber road for a while by the hand. He wanted her to be right smack in the middle of them, he said, for her first sight.
    And goodness! Such a sight! When he said, "All right, you can open your eyes now," she did it, quick. It was more than anybody could believe who hadn't seen it for herself. All over the ground around her were great green leaves, each with a cleft in the side. Up through each cleft came a long thin stem, and on top of each stem stood a pointed bud exactly like a candle flame. Some were opening. The sun fingered its way through tiny green new leaves, and as it moved over the ground, as its light spread, the pointed buds opened. And more. And more. The petals were shiny white, like the inside of a shell. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, turned to the sun.
    "Tomorrow they'll be gone," Mr. Chris said in a hushed voice. "Hardly anybody ever sees them open like this. A fellow named Harry who lives on the other end of the mountain told me about them first, after I'd lived here twenty years or so. They call it bloodroot." He leaned down and cut one out of the ground with his pocketknife. It had a scarlet root, as bright as blood, so that was where it got its name. Some plants got their names from leaves, some from flowers, some from seeds, some from roots. And the oddest things were the ones like violets and roses, named from a color, so you had to call yellow and white and red ones violets and roses. "Used to be a notion that witches killed folks with the blood from this root," Mr. Chris said. "But of course it was just a tale. Anyhow, about witches. But it's absolutely true that if anybody eats it, his heart will stop in a day."
    Marly stared at it, there in his hand, thinking about what Mrs. Chris had said about him and his heart. "Maybe you'd better not hold it in your hand, Mr. Chris," she said.
    He laughed. "It's not that dangerous, Marly. This flower will keep a long time if you put it in water, so take it along with you and enjoy it. Show it to the folks. Picking bloodroot flowers is no good unless you take the whole thing, root and all. Like spring beauties. They fade away in your hands."
    If there were hundreds of bloodroot blossoms, there must have been thousands of hepaticas. They grew in huge masses of pink and white and every shade of blue, fairly tumbling down the hills. Folks thought, Mr. Chris said, that hepatica leaves were good for liver medicine because the leaves were the shape of livers. "So it's even called 'liverwort,' sometimes," he said, "that pretty flower! But it's got more names than you can shake a stick at. Some say it's a 'herb-trinity' because of the three leaves. Some call it a 'squirrel cup.' And some call it a 'mouse-ear.' Take your choice."
    The very first trillium to bloom was deep red, which was likely why folks call it a "wake-robin." Then the white ones were everywhere, covering the floor of the woods thicker than the bloodroot flowers. Some were huge, at least six inches wide altogether.
    Mr. Chris knew where they grew the biggest. And he knew where to go to find little tiny ones, no bigger than apple blossoms, that were painted pink in their middles.
    Mother smiled when Marly marveled at all the things Mr. Chris knew. "That's how Grandma was," she said. "She wrote down in her journal every day what had come up in the garden and what was in bloom in the woods and the fields, so finally she could look back in her journal and tell when any flower had bloomed any year. Then she could be watching for each one to come again."
    "But Mr. Chris says you have to really watch," Marly said. "Some years things are early, and some years things are late."
    "That's true, of course. I remember Grandma saying you couldn't bring things out of the ground until they were ready."
    "Of course you can
help,
" Marly said seriously. "Today I went all around helping