"I want the inner meaning and the understanding of the wildflowers in the meadow. Why are they? What end? What purpose? The plant knows, and sees, and feels; where is its mind when the petal falls? Absorbed in the universal dynamic force, or what? They make no shadow of pretence, these beautiful flowers, of being beautiful for my sake; of bearing honey for me; in short, there does not seem to be any kind of relationship understood between us, and yet . . . language does not express the dumb feelings of the mind any more than the flower can speak. I want to know the soul of the flowers! . . . All these life-laboured monographs, these classifications, works of Linnaeus, and our own classic Darwin, microscope, physiology - and the flower has not given us its message yet.' ' - Richard Jeffries.
JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT; INDIAN TURNIP (Arisaema triphyllum) Arum family
Flowers - Minute, greenish yellow, clustered on the lower part of a smooth, club-shaped, slender spadix within a green and maroon or whitish-striped spathe that curves in a brpointed flap above it. Leaves: 3-foliate, usually overtopping the spathe, their slender petioles 9 to 30 in. high, or as tall as the scape that rises from an acrid corm. Fruit: Smooth, shining red berries clustered on the thickened club. Preferred Habitat - Moist woodland and thickets. Flowering Season - April-June. Distribution - Nova Scotia westward to Minnesota, and southward to the Gulf States.
A jolly looking preacher is Jack, standing erect in his particolored pulpit with a sounding-board over his head; but he is a gay deceiver, a wolf in sheep's clothing,, literally a "brother to dragons," an arrant upstart, an ingrate, a murderer of innocent benefactors! "Female botanizing classes pounce upon it as they would upon a pious young clergyman," complains Mr. Ellwanger. A poor relation of the stately calla lily one knows Jack to be at a glance, her lovely white robe corresponding to his striped pulpit, her bright yellow spadix to his sleek reverence. In the damp woodlands where his pulpit is erected beneath leafy cathedral arches, minute flies or gnats, recently emerged from maggots in mushrooms, ttools, or decaying logs, form the main part of his congregation.
Now, to drop the clerical simile, let us peep within the sheathing spathe, or, better still, strip it off altogether. Dr. Torrey states that the dark-striped spathes are the fertile plants, those with green and whitish lines, sterile. Within are smooth, glossy columns, and near the base of each we shall find the true flowers, minute affairs, some staminate; others, on distinct plants, pistillate, the berry bearers; or rarely both male and female florets seated on the same club, as if Jack's elaborate plan to prevent self-fertilization were not yet complete. Plants may be detected in process of evolution toward their ideals: just as nations and men are. Doubtless, when Jack's mechanism is perfected, his guilt will disappear. A little way above the florets the club enlarges abruptly, forming a projecting ledge that effectually closes the avenue of escape for many a guileless victim. A fungus gnat, enticed perhaps by the striped house of refuge from cold spring winds, and with a prospect of food below, enters and slides down the inside walls or the slippery colored column: in either case descent is very easy; it is the return that is made so difficult, if not impossible, for the tiny visitors. Squeezing past the projecting ledge, the gnat finds himself in a roomy apartment whose floor - the bottom of the pulpit - is dusted over with fine pollen; that is, if he is among staminate flowers already mature. To get some of that pollen, with which the gnat presently covers himself, transferred to the minute pistillate florets waiting for it in a distant chamber is, of course, Jack's whole aim in enticing visitors within his polished walls; but what means are provided for their escape? Their efforts to crawl upward over the slippery surface only land them weak and discouraged where they started. The projecting ledge overhead prevents them from using their wings; the passage between the ledge and the spathe is far too narrow to permit flight. Now, if a gnat be persevering, he will presently discover a gap in the flap where the spathe folds together in front, and through this tiny opening he makes his escape, only to enter another pulpit, like the trusted, but too trusting, messenger he is, and leave some of the vitalizing pollen on the fertile florets awaiting his coming.
But suppose the fly, small as he is, is too large to work his way out through the flap, or too bewildered or stupid to find the opening, or too exhausted after his futile efforts to get out through the overhead route to persevere, or too weak with hunger in case of long detention in a pistillate trap where no pollen is, what then? Open a dozen of Jack's pulpits, and in several, at least, dead victims will be found - pathetic little corpses sacrificed to the imperfection of his executive system. Had the flies entered mature spathes, whose walls had spread outward and away from the polished column, flight through the overhead route might have been possible. However glad we may be to make every due allowance for this sacrifice of the higher life to the lower, as only a temporary imperfection of mechanism incidental to the plant's higher development, Jacks present cruelty shocks us no less. Or, it may be, he will become insectivorous like the pitcher plant in time. He comes from a rascally family, anyhow. (See cuckoo pint.)
In June and July the thick-set club, studded over with bright berries, becomes conspicuous, to attract hungry woodland rovers in the hope that the seeds will be dropped far from the parent plant. The Indians used to boil the berries for food. The farinaceous root (corm) they likewise boiled or dried to extract the stinging, blistering juice, leaving an edible little "turnip," however insipid and starchy.
The GREEN DRAGON, or DRAGON-ROOT (A. Dracontium), to which Jack is brother, is found in similar situations or beside streams in wet, shady ground, and sends up a narrow greenish or whitish tapering spathe, one or two inches long, enwrapping a slender, pointed spadix, that projects sometimes seven inches beyond its tip. Within, tiny pistillate florets are seated around the base, while on the staminate plants the inflorescence extends higher. A large, solitary, dark green leaf, divided into from five to seventeen oblong, pointed segments, spreads above. Large ovoid heads of reddish-orange berries are the plant's most conspicuous feature.
SKUNK OR SWAMP CABBAGE (Spathyema fetida; Symplocarpus fetidus of Gray) Arum family
Flowers - Minute, perfect, fetid; many scattered over a thick, rounded, fleshy spadix, and hidden within a swollen, shell-shaped, purplish-brown to greenish-yellow, usually mottled, spathe, close to the ground, that appears before the leaves. Spadix much enlarged and spongy in fruit, the bulb-like berries imbedded in its surface. Leaves: In large crowns like cabbages, bry ovate, often 1 ft. across, strongly nerved, their petioles with deep grooves, malodorous. Preferred Habitat - Swamps, wet ground. Flowering Season - February-April. Distribution - Nova Scotia to Florida, and westward to Minnesota and Iowa.
This despised relative of the stately calla lily proclaims spring in the very teeth of winter, being the first bold adventurer above ground. When the lovely hepatica, the first flower worthy the name to appear, is still wrapped in her fuzzy furs, the skunk cabbage's dark incurved horn shelters within its hollow, tiny, malodorous florets. Why is the entire plant so fetid that one flees the neighborhood, pervaded as it is with an odor that combines a suspicion of skunk, putrid meat, and garlic? After investigating the carrion-flower (q.v.) and the purple trillium, among others, we learned that certain flies delight in foul odors loathsome to higher organisms; that plants dependent on these pollen carriers woo them from long distances with a stench, and in addition sometimes try to charm them with color resembling the sort of meat it is their special mission, with the help of beetles and other scavengers of Nature, to remove from the face of the earth. In such marshy ground as the skunk cabbage lives in, many small flies and gnats live in embryo under the fallen leaves during the winter. But even before they are warmed into active life, the hive-bees, natives of Europe, and with habits not perfectly adapted as yet to our flora (nor our flora's habits to theirs - see milkweed), are out after pollen. Where would they find any so early, if not within the skunk cabbage's livid horn of plenty? Not even an alder catkin or a pussy willow has expanded yet. In spite of the bee's refined taste in the matter of perfume and color, she has no choice, now, but to enter so generous an entertainer. At the top of the thick rounded spadix within, the skunk cabbage florets there first mature their stigmas, and pollen must therefore be carried to them on the bodies of visitors. Later these stigmas wither, and abundant pollen is shed from the now ripe anthers. Meantime the lower, younger florets having matured their stigmas, some pollen may fall directly on them from the older flowers above. A bee crawling back and forth over the spadix gets thoroughly dusted, and flying off to another cluster of florets cross-fertilizes them - that is, if all goes well. But because the honeybee never entered the skunk cabbage's calculations, useful as the immigrant proved to be, the horn that was manifestly designed for smaller flies often proves a fatal trap. Occasionally a bee finds the entrance she has managed to squeeze through too narrow and slippery for an exit, and she perishes miserably.
"A couple of weeks after finding the first bee," says Mr. William Trelease in the "American Naturalist," "the spathes will be found swarming with the minute black flies that were sought in vain earlier in the season, and their number is attested not only by the hundreds of them which can be seen, but also by the many small but very fat spiders whose webs bar the entrance to three-fourths of the spathes. During the present spring a few specimens of a small scavenger beetle have been captured within the spathes of this plant.... Finally, other and more attractive flowers opening, the bees appear to cease visiting those of this species, and countless small flies take their place, compensating for their small size by their great numbers." These, of course, are the benefactors the skunk cabbage catered to ages before the honeybee reached our shores.
After the flowering time come the vivid green crowns of leaves that at least please the eye. Lizards make their home beneath them, and many a yellowthroat, taking advantage of the plant's foul odor, gladly puts up with it herself and builds her nest in the hollow of the cabbage as a protection for her eggs and young from four-footed enemies. Cattle let the plant alone because of the stinging, acrid juices secreted by it, although such tender, fresh, bright foliage must be especially tempting, like the hellebore's, after a dry winter diet. Sometimes tiny insects are found drowned in the wells of rain water that accumulate at the base of the grooved leafstalks.
RED, WOOD, FLAME, or PHILADELPHIA LILY (Lilium Philadelphicum) Lily family
Flowers - Erect, tawny or red-tinted outside; vermilion, or sometimes reddish orange, and spotted with madder brown within; 1 to 5, on separate peduncles, borne at the summit. Perianth of 6 distinct, spreading, spatulate segments, each narrowed into a claw, and with a nectar groove at its base; 6 stamens; 1 style, the club-shaped stigma 3-lobed. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. tall, from a bulb composed of narrow, jointed, fleshy scales. Leaves: In whorls of 3's to 8's, lance-shaped, seated at intervals on the stem. Preferred Habitat - Dry woods, sandy soil, borders, and thickets. Flowering Season - June-July. Distribution - Northern border of United States, westward to Ontario, south to the Carolinas and West Virginia.
Erect, as if conscious of its striking beauty, this vivid lily lifts a chalice that suggests a trap for catching sunbeams from fiery old Sol. Defiant of his scorching rays in its dry habitat, it neither nods nor droops even during prolonged drought; and vet many people confuse it with the gracefully pendent, swaying bells of the yellow Canada lily, which will grow in a swamp rather than forego moisture. Li, the Celtic for white, from which the family derived its name, makes this bright-hued flower blush to own it. Seedmen, who export quantities of our superb native lilies to Europe, supply bulbs so cheap that no one should wait four years for flowers from seed, or go without their splendor in our over-conventional gardens. Why this early lily is radiantly colored and speckled is told in the description of the Canada lily (q.v.).
The WESTERN RED LILY (L. umbellatum), that takes the place of the Philadelphia species from Ohio, Minnesota, and the Northwest Territory, southward to Missouri, Arkansas, and Colorado, lifts similar but smaller red, orange, or yellow flowers on a more slender stem, two feet high or less, set with narrow, linear, alternate leaves, or perhaps the upper ones in whorls. It blooms in June or July, in dry soil, preferably in open, sandy situations.
LARGE CORAL-ROOT (Corallorhiza multiflora) Orchid family
Flowers - Dull brownish purple, about 1/2 in. high; 10 to 30 borne in a raceme 2 to 8 in. long. Petals about the length of sepals, and somewhat united at the base; spur yellowish, the oval lip white, spotted and lined with purplish; 3-lobed, wavy edged. Scape, 8 to 20 in. tall, colored, furnished with several flat scales. Leaves: None. Root: A branching, coral-like mass. Preferred Habitat - Dry woods. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - Nova Scotia, westward to British Columbia; south to Florida, Missouri, and California.
To the majority of people the very word orchid suggests a millionaire's hothouse, or some fashionable florist's show window, where tropical air plants send forth gorgeous blossoms, exquisite in color, marvelous in form; so that when this insignificant little stalk pokes its way through the soil at midsummer and produces some dull flowers of indefinite shades and no leaves at all to help make them attractive, one feels that the coral-root is a very poor relation of theirs indeed. The prettily marked lower lip, at once a platform and nectar guide to the insect alighting on it, is all that suggests ambition worthy of an orchid.
If poverty of men and nations can be traced to certain radical causes by the social economist, just as surely can the botanist account for loss of leaves - riches - by closely examining the poverty-stricken plant. Every phenomenon has its explanation. A glance at the extraordinary formation under ground reveals the fact that the coral-roots, although related to the most aristocratic and highly organized plants in existence, have stooped to become ghoulish saprophytes. An honest herb abounds in good green coloring matter (chlorophyll), that serves as a light screen to the cellular juices of leaf and stem. It also forms part of its digestive apparatus, aiding a plant in the manufacture of its own food out of the soil, water, and gases; whereas a plant that lives by piracy - a parasite - or a saprophyte, that sucks up the already assimilated products of another's decay, loses its useless chlorophyll as surely as if it had been kept in a cellar. In time its equally useless leaves dwindle to bracts, or disappear. Nature wastes no energy. Fungi, for example, are both parasites and saprophytes; and so when plants far higher up in the evolutionary scale than they lose leaves and green color too, we may know they are degenerates belonging to that disreputable gang of branded sinners which includes the Indian-pipe, broom-rape, dodder, pine-sap, and beech-drops. Others, like the gerardias and foxgloves, may even now be detected on the brink of a fall from grace.
The EARLY CORAL-ROOT (C. Corallorhiza; C. innata of Gray) - a similar but smaller species, whose loose spike of dull purplish flowers likewise terminates a scaly purplish or yellowish scape arising from a mass of short, thick, whitish, fleshy, blunt fibers, may be found in the moist woods blooming in May or June. It has a more northerly range, however, extending from the mountains of Georgia, it is true, but chiefly from the northern boundary of the United States, from New England westward to the State of Washington, and northward to Nova Scotia and Alaska.
ADAM AND EVE; PUTTY-ROOT (Aplectrum spicatum; A. hyemale of Gray)) Orchid family
Flowers - Dingy yellowish brown and purplish, about 1 in. long, each on a short pedicel, in a few-flowered, loose, bracted raceme 2 to 4 in. long. No spur; sepals and petals similar, small and narrow, the lip wavy-edged. Scape: to 2 ft. high, smooth, with about 3 sheathing scales. Leaf: Solitary, rising from the corm in autumn, elliptic, br plaited-nerved, 4 to 6 in. long. Root: A corm usually attached to one of the preceding season. Preferred Habitat - Moist woods or swamps. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Georgia, Missouri, and California northward, into British Possessions.
More curious than beautiful is this small orchid whose dingy flowers of indefinite color and without spurs interest us far less than the two corms barely hidden below ground. These singular solid bulbs, about an inch thick, are connected by a slender stalk, suggesting to the imaginative person who named the plant our first parents standing hand in hand in the Garden of Eden.
But usually several old corms - not always two, by any means - remain attached to the nearest one, a bulb being produced each year until Cain and Abel often join Adam and Eve to make up quite a family group. A strong, glutinous matter within the corms has been used as a cement, hence the plant's other popular name. From the newest bulb added, a solitary large leaf arises in late summer or autumn, to remain all winter. The flower stalk comes up at one side of it the following spring. Meantime the old corms retain their life, apparently to help nourish the young one still joined to them, while its system is taxed with flowering.
WILD GINGER; CANADA SNAKEROOT; ASARABACCA (Asarum Canadense) Birthwort family
Flower - Solitary, dull purplish brown, creamy white within, about 1 in. brwhen expanded, borne on a short peduncle close to or upon the ground. Calyx cup-shaped, deeply cleft, its 3 acutely pointed lobes spreading, curved; corolla wanting; 12 short, stout stamens inserted on ovary; the thick style 6-lobed, its stigmas radiating on the lobes. Leaves: A single pair, dark green, reniform, 4 to 7 in. br on downy petioles 6 to 12 in. high, from a creeping, thick, aromatic, pungent rootstock. Preferred Habitat - Rich, moist woods; hillsides. Flowering Season - March-May. Distribution - North Carolina, Missouri, and Kansas, northward, to New Brunswick and Manitoba.
Like the wicked servant who buried the one talent entrusted to his care, the wild ginger hides its solitary flower if not actually under the dry leaves that clothe the ground in the still leafless woodlands, then not far above them. Why? When most plants flaunt their showy blossoms aloft, where they may be seen of all, why should this one bear only one dull, firm cup, inconspicuous in color as in situation? In early spring - and it is one of the earliest flowers - gnats and small flies are warming into active life from the maggots that have lain under dead leaves and the bark of decaying logs all winter. To such guests a flower need offer few attractions to secure them in swarms. Bright, beautiful colors, sweet fragrance, luscious nectar, with which the highly specialized bees, butterflies, and moths are wooed, would all be lost on them, lacking as they do esthetic taste. For flies, a snug shelter from cold spring winds such as Jack-in-the-pulpit, the marsh calla, the pitcher-plant, or the skunk cabbage offers; sometimes a fetid odor like the latter's, or dull purplish red or brownish color resembling stale meat, which the purple trillium likewise wears as an additional attraction, are necessary when certain carrion flies must be catered to; and, above all, an abundance of pollen for food - with any or all of these seductions a flower dependent on flies has nothing to fear from neglect. Therefore the wild ginger does not even attempt to fertilize itself. Within the cozy cup one can usually find a contented fly seeking shelter or food. Close to the ground it is warm and less windy. When the cup first opens, only the stigmas are mature and sticky to receive any pollen the visitors may bring in on their bodies from other asylums where they have been hiding. These stigmas presently withering, up rise the twelve stamens beside them to dust with pollen the flies coming in search of it. Only one flower from a root compels cross-fertilizing between flowers of distinct plants - a means to insure the most vigorous seed, as Darwin proved. Evidently the ginger is striving to attain some day the ambitious mechanism for temporarily imprisoning its guests that its cousin the Dutchman's pipe has perfected. After fertilization the cup nods, inverted, and the leathery capsule following it bursts irregularly, discharging many seeds.
No ruminant will touch the leaves, owing to their bitter juices, nor will a grub or nibbling rodent molest the root, which bites like ginger; nevertheless credulous mankind once utilized the plant as a tonic medicine.
DUTCHMAN'S PIPE; PIPE-VINE (Aristolochia macrophylla; A. Sipho of Gray))
Flower - An inflated, curved, yellowish-green, veiny tube (calyx), pipe-shaped, except that it abruptly brns beyond the contracted throat into 3 flat, spreading, dark purplish or reddish-brown lobes; pipe 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, borne on a long, drooping peduncle, either solitary or 2 or 3 together, from the bracted leaf-axils; 6 anthers, without filaments, in united pairs under the 3 lobes of the short, thick stigma. Stem: A very long, twining vine, the branches smooth and green. Leaves: Thin, reniform to heart-shaped, slender petioled, downy underneath when young; 6 to 15 in. brwhen mature. Fruit: An oblong, cylindric capsule, containing quantities of seeds within its six sections. Preferred Habitat - Rich, moist woods. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Pennsylvania, westward to Minnesota, south to Georgia and Kansas. Escaped from cultivation further north.
After learning why the pitcher plant, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and skunk cabbage are colored and shaped as they are, no one will be surprised on opening this curious flower to find numbers of little flies within the pipe. Certain relatives of this vine produce flowers that are not only colored like livid, putrid meat around the entrance, but also emit a fetid odor to attract carrion flies especially. (See purple trillium.)
In May, when the pipe-vine blooms, gauzy-winged small flies and gnats gladly seek food and shelter from the wind within so attractive an asylum as the curving tube offers. They enter easily enough through the narrow throat, around which fine hairs point downward - an entrance resembling an eel trap's. Any pollen they may bring in on their bodies now rubs off on the sticky stigma lobes, already matured at the bottom of a newly opened flower, in which they buzz, crawl, slide, and slip, seeking an avenue of escape. None presents itself: they are imprisoned. The hairs at the entrance, approached from within, form an impenetrable stockade. Must the poor little creatures perish? Is the flower heartless enough to murder its benefactors, on which the continuance of its species depends? By no means is it so shortsighted! A few tiny drops of nectar exuding from the center table prevent the visitors from starving. Presently the fertilized stigmas wither, and when they have safely escaped the danger of self-fertilization, the pollen hidden under their lobes ripens and dusts afresh the little flies so impatiently awaiting the feast. Now, and not till now, it is to the advantage of the species that the prisoners be released, that they may carry the vitalizing dust to stigmas waiting for it in younger flowers. Accordingly, the slippery pipe begins to shrivel, thus offering a foothold; the once stiff hairs that guarded its exit grow limp, and the happy gnats, after a generous entertainment and snug protection, escape uninjured, and by no means unwilling to repeat the experience. Evidently the wild ginger, belonging to a genus next of kin, is striving to perfect a similar prison. In the language of the street, the ginger flower does not yet "work" its.visitors "for all they are worth."
Later, when we see the exquisite dark, velvety, blue-green, pipe-vine, swallow-tail butterfly (Papilio philenor) hovering about verandas or woodland bowers that are shaded with the pipe-vine's large leaves, we may know she is there only to lay eggs that her caterpillar descendants may find themselves on their favorite food store.
The VIRGINIA SNAKEROOT or SERPENTARY (A. serpentaria), found in dry woods, chiefly in the Middle States and South, although its range extends northward to Connecticut, New York, and Michigan, is the species whose aromatic root is used in medicine. It is a low-growing herb, not a vine; its heart-shaped leaves, which are narrow and tapering to a point, are green on both sides, and the curious, greenish, S-shaped flower, which grows alone at the tip of a scaly footstalk from the root, appears in June or July. Sometimes the flowers are cleistogamous (see violet wood-sorrel).
FIRE PINK; VIRGINIA CATCHFLY (Silene Virginica) Pink family
Flowers - Scarlet or crimson, 1 1/2 in. bror less, a few on slender pedicels from the upper leaf-axils. Calyx sticky, tubular, bell-shaped, 5-cleft, enlarged in fruit; corolla of 5 wide-spread, narrow, notched petals, sometimes deeply 2-cleft; 10 stamens; 3 styles. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high; erect, slender, sticky. Leaves: Thin, spatulate, 3 to 5 in. long; or upper ones oblong to lance-shaped. Preferred Habitat - Dry, open woodland. Flowering Season - May-September. Distribution - Southern New Jersey to Minnesota, south to Georgia and Missouri.
The rich, glowing scarlet of these pinks that fleck the Southern woodland as with fire, will light up our Northern rock gardens too, if we but sow the seed under glass in earliest spring, and set out the young plants in well-drained, open ground in May. Division of old perennial roots causes the plants to sulk; dampness destroys them.
To the brilliant blossoms butterflies chiefly come to sip (see wild pink), and an occasional hummingbird, fascinated by the color that seems ever irresistible to him, hovers above them on whirring wings. Hapless ants, starting to crawl up the stem, become more and more discouraged by its stickiness, and if they persevere in their attempts to steal from the butterfly's legitimate preserves, death overtakes their erring feet as speedily as if they ventured on sticky fly paper. How humane is the way to protect flowers from crawling thieves that has been adopted by the high-bush cranberry and the partridge pea (q.v.), among other plants! These provide a free lunch of sweets in the glands of their leaves to satisfy pilferers, which then seek no farther, leaving the flowers to winged insects that are at once despoilers and benefactors.
WILD COLUMBINE (Aquilegia Canadensis) Crowfoot family
Flower - Red outside, yellow within, irregular, 1 to 2 in. long, solitary, nodding from a curved footstalk from the upper leaf-axils. Petals 5, funnel-shaped, but quickly narrowing into long, erect, very slender hollow spurs, rounded at the tip and united below by the 5 spreading red sepals, between which the straight spurs ascend; numerous stamens and 5 pistils projecting. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high; branching, soft-hairy or smooth. Leaves: More or less divided, the lobes with rounded teeth; large lower compound leaves on long petioles. Fruit: An erect pod, each of the 5 divisions tipped with a long, sharp beak. Preferred Habitat - Rocky places, rich woodland. Flowering Season - April-July. Distribution - Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territory; southward to the Gulf States. Rocky Mountains.
Although under cultivation the columbine nearly doubles its size, it never has the elfin charm in a conventional garden that it possesses wild in Nature's. Dancing in red and yellow petticoats to the rhythm of the breeze, along the ledge of overhanging rocks, it coquettes with some Punchinello as if daring him to reach her at his peril. Who is he? Let us sit a while on the rocky ledge and watch for her lovers.
Presently a big muscular bumblebee booms along. Owing to his great strength, an inverted, pendent blossom, from which he must cling upside down, has no more terrors for him than a trapeze for the trained acrobat. His long tongue - if he is one of the largest of our sixty-two species of Bombus - can suck almost any flower unless it is especially adapted to night-flying sphinx moths, but can he drain this? He is the truest benefactor of the European columbine (q.v.), whose spurs suggested the talons of an eagle (aquila) to imaginative Linnaeus when he gave this group of plants its generic name. Smaller bumblebees, unable through the shortness of their tongues to feast in a legitimate manner, may be detected nipping holes in the tips of all columbines, where the nectar is secreted, just as they do in larkspurs, Dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, butter and eggs, and other flowers whose deeply hidden nectaries make dining too difficult for the little rogues. Fragile butterflies, absolutely dependent on nectar, hover near our showy wild columbine with its five tempting horns of plenty, but sail away again, knowing as they do that their weak legs are not calculated to stand the strain of an inverted position from a pendent flower, nor are their tongues adapted to slender tubes unless these may be entered from above. The tongues of both butterflies and moths bend readily only when directed beneath their bodies. It will be noticed that our columbine's funnel-shaped tubes contract just below the point where the nectar is secreted - doubtless to protect it from small bees. When we see the honeybee or the little wild bees - Haliclus chiefly - on the flower, we may know they get pollen only.
Finally a ruby-throated hummingbird whirs into sight. Poising before a columbine, and moving around it to drain one spur after another until the five are emptied, he flashes like thought to another group of inverted red cornucopias, visits in turn every flower in the colony, then whirs away quite as suddenly as he came. Probably to him, and no longer to the outgrown bumblebee, has the flower adapted itself. The European species wears blue, the bee's favorite color according to Sir John Lubbock; the nectar hidden in its spurs, which are shorter, stouter, and curved, is accessible only to the largest humblebees. There are no hummingbirds in Europe. (See jewel-weed.) Our native columbine, on the contrary, has longer, contracted, straight, erect spurs, most easily drained by the ruby-throat which, like Eugene Field, ever delights in "any color at all so long as it's red."
To help make the columbine conspicuous, even the sepals become red; but the flower is yellow within, it is thought to guide visitors to the nectaries. The stamens protrude like a golden tassel. After the anthers pass the still immature stigmas, the pollen of the outer row ripens, ready for removal, while the inner row of undeveloped stamens still acts as a sheath for the stigmas. Owing to the pendent position of the flower, no pollen could fall on the latter in any case. The columbine is too highly organized to tolerate self-fertilization. When all the stamens have discharged their pollen, the styles then elongate; and the feathery stigmas, opening and curving sidewise, bring themselves at the entrance of each of the five cornucopias, just the position the anthers previously occupied. Probably even the small bees, collecting pollen only, help carry some from flower to flower but perhaps the largest bumblebees, and certainly the hummingbird, must be regarded as the columbine's legitimate benefactors. Caterpillars of one of the dusky wings (Papilio lucilius) feed on the leaves.
Very rarely is the columbine white, and then its name, derived from words meaning two doves, does not seem wholly misapplied.
"O Columbine, open your folded wrapper Where two twin turtle-doves dwell,"
lisp thousands of children speaking the "Songs of Seven" as a first "piece" at school. How Emerson loved the columbine! Dr. Prior says the flower was given its name because "of the resemblance of the nectaries to the heads of pigeons in a ring around a dish - a favorite device of ancient artists."
This exquisite plant was forwarded from the Virginia colony to England for the gardens of Hampton Court by a young kinsman of Tradescant, gardener and herbalist to Charles I.
PITCHER-PLANT; SIDE-SADDLE FLOWER; HUNTSMAN'S CUP; INDIAN DIPPER (Sarracenea purpurea) Pitcher-plant family
Flower - Deep reddish purple, sometimes partly greenish, pink, or red, 2 in. or more across, globose; solitary, nodding from scape 1 to 2 ft. tall. Calyx of 5 sepals, with 3 or 4 bracts at base; 5 overlapping petals, enclosing a yellowish, umbrella-shaped dilation of the style, with 5 rays terminating in 5-hooked stigmas; stamens indefinite. Leaves: Hollow, pitcher-shaped through the folding together of their margins, leaving a brwing; much inflated, hooded, yellowish green with dark maroon or purple lines and veinings, 4 to 12 in. long, curved, in a tuft from the root. Preferred Habitat - Peat bogs; spongy, mossy swamps. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, south to Florida, Kentucky, and Minnesota.
"What's this I hear About the new carnivora? Can little piants Eat bugs and ants And gnats and flies? - A sort of retrograding: Surely the fare Of flowers is air Or sunshine sweet They shouldn't eat Or do aught so degrading!"
There must always be something shocking in the sacrifice of the higher life to the lower, of the sensate to what we are pleased to call the insensate, although no one who has studied the marvelously intelligent motives that impel a plant's activities can any longer consider the vegetable creation as lacking sensibility. Science is at length giving us a glimmering of the meaning of the word universe, teaching, as it does, that all creatures in sharing the One Life share in many of its powers, and differ from one another only in degree of possession, not in kind. The transition from one so-called kingdom into another presumably higher one is a purely arbitrary line marked by man, and often impossible to define. The animalcule and the insectivorous plant know no boundaries between the animal and the vegetable. And who shall say that the sun-dew or the bladderwort is not a higher organism than the amoeba? Animated plants, and vegetating. animals parallel each other. Several hundred carnivorous plants in all parts of the world have now been named by scientists.
It is well worth a journey to some spongy, sphagnum bog to gather clumps of pitcher-plants which will furnish an interesting study to an entire household throughout the summer while they pursue their nefarious business in a shallow bowl on the veranda. A modification of the petiole forms a deep hollow pitcher having for its spout a modification of the blade of the leaf. Usually the pitchers are half filled with water and tiny drowned victims when we gather them. Some of this fluid must be rain, but the open pitcher secretes much juice too. Certain relatives, whose pitchers have hooded lids that keep out rain, are nevertheless filled with fluid. On the Pacific Coast the golden jars of Darlingtonia Californica, with their overarching hoods, are often so large and watery as to drown small birds and field mice. Note in passing that these otherwise dark prisons have translucent spots at the top, whereas our pitcher-plant is lighted through its open transom.
A sweet secretion within the pitcher's rim, which some say is intoxicating, others, that it is an anaesthetic, invites insects to a fatal feast. It is a simple enough matter for them to walk into the pitcher over the band of stiff hairs, pointing downward like the withes of a lobster pot, that form an inner covering, or to slip into the well if they attempt crawling over its polished upper surface. To fly upward in a perpendicular line once their wings are wet is additionally hopeless, because of the hairs that guard the mouth of the trap; and so, after vain attempts to fly or crawl out of the prison, they usually sink exhausted into a watery grave.
When certain plants live in soil that is so poor in nitrogen compounds that protein formation is interfered with, they have come to depend more or less on a carnivorous diet. The sundew (q.v.) actually digests its prey with the help of a gastric juice similar to what is found in the stomach of animals; but the bladderwort (q.v.) and pitcher-plants can only absorb in the form of soup the products of their victims' decay. Flies and gnats drowned in these pitchers quickly yield their poor little bodies; but owing to the beetle's hard-shell covering, many a rare specimen may be rescued intact to add to a collection.
A similar ogre plant is the YELLOW-FLOWERED TRUMPET-LEAF (S. flava) found in bogs in the Southern States.
GROUND-NUT (Apios Apios; A. tuberosa of Gray) Pea family
Flowers - Fragrant, chocolate brown and reddish purple, numerous, about 1/2 in. long, clustered in racemes from the leaf-axils. Calyx 2-lipped, corolla papilionaceous, the brstandard petal turned backward, the keel sickle-shaped; stamens within it 9 and 1. Stem: From tuberous, edible rootstock; climbing, slender, several feet long, the juice milky. Leaves: Compounded of 5 to 7 ovate leaflets. Fruit: A leathery, slightly curved pod, 2 to 4 in. long. Preferred Habitat - Twining about undergrowth and thickets in moist or wet ground. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - New Brunswick to Ontario, south to the Gulf States and Kansas.
No one knows better than the omnivorous "barefoot boy" that
"where the ground-nut trails its vine"
there is hidden something really good to eat under the soft, moist soil where legions of royal fern, usually standing guard above it, must be crushed before he digs up the coveted tubers. He would be the last to confuse it with the WILD KIDNEY BEAN or BEAN VINE (Phaseolus polystachyus; P. perennis of Gray). The latter has loose racemes of smaller purple flowers and leaflets in threes; nevertheless it is often confounded with the ground-nut vine by older naturalists whose knowledge was "learned of schools."
Usually a bee, simply by alighting on the wings of a blossom belonging to the pea family, releases the stamens and pistil from the keel; not so here. The sickle-shaped keel of the ground-nut's flower rests its tip firmly in a notch of the standard petal, nor will any jar or pressure from outside release it. A bee, guided to the nectary by the darker color of the underside of the curved keel which spans the open cavity of the flower, enters, at least partially, and so releases by his pressure, applied from underneath, the tip of the sickle from its notch in the standard. Now the released keel curves all the more, and splits open to release the stigmatic tip of the style that touches any pollen the bee may have brought from another blossom. Continuing to curve and coil while the bee sucks, it presently dusts him afresh with pollen from the now released anthers. A mass of pulp between anthers and stigma prevents any of the flower's own pollen from self-fertilizing it. These little blossoms, barely half an inch long, with their ingenious mechanism to compel cross-fertilization, repay the closest study.
At midnight the leaves of the ground-nut.and wild bean "are hardly to be recognized in their queer antics," says William Hamilton Gibson. "The garden beans too play similar pranks. Those lima bean poles of the garden hold a sleepy crowd."
PINE SAP; FALSE BEECH-DROPS; YELLOW BIRD'S-NEST (Hypopitis Hypopitis; Monolropa Hypopitis of Gray) Indian-pipe family
Flowers - Tawny, yellow,ecru, brownish pink, reddish, or bright crimson, fragrant, about 1/2 in. long; oblong bell-shaped; borne in a one-sided, terminal, slightly drooping raceme, becoming erect after maturity. Scapes: Clustered from a dense mass of fleshy, fibrous roots; 4 to 12 in. tall, scaly bracted, the bractlets resembling the sepals. Leaves: None. Preferred Habitat - Dry woods, especially under fir, beech, and oak trees. Flowering Season - June-October. Distribution - Florida and Arizona, far northward into British Possessions. Europe and Asia.
Branded a sinner, through its loss of leaves and honest green coloring matter (chlorophyll), the pine sap stands among the disreputable 'gang' of thieves that includes its next of kin the Indian-pipe, the broom-rape, dodder, coral-root, and beech-drops (q.v.). Degenerates like these, although members of highly respectable, industrious, virtuous families, would appear to be as low in the vegetable kingdom as any fungus, were it not for the flowers they still bear. Petty larceny, no greater than the foxglove's at first, then greater and greater thefts, finally lead to ruin, until the pine-sap parasite either sucks its food from the roots of the trees under which it takes up its abode, or absorbs, like a ghoulish saprophyte, the products of vegetable decay. A plant that does not manufacture its own dinner has no need of chlorophyll and leaves, for assimilation of crude food can take place only in those cells which contain the vital green. This substance, universally found in plants that grub in the soil and literally sweat for their daily bread, acts also as a moderator of respiration by its absorptive influence on light, and hence allows the elimination of carbon dioxide to go on in the cells which contain it. Fungi and these degenerates which lack chlorophyll usually grow in dark, shady woods.
Within each little fragrant pine-sap blossom a fringe of hairs, radiating from the style, forms a stockade against short-tongued insects that fain would pilfer from the bees. As the plant grows old, whatever charm it had in youth disappears, when an unwholesome mold overspreads its features.
SCARLET PIMPERNEL; POOR MAN'S or SHEPHERD'S WEATHER-GLASS; RED CHICKWEED; BURNET ROSE; SHEPHERD'S CLOCK (Anagallis arvensis) Primrose family
Flower - Variable, scarlet, deep salmon, copper red, flesh colored, or rarely white; usually darker in the center; about 1/4 in. across; wheel-shaped; 5-parted; solitary, on thread-like peduncles from the leaf-axils. Stem: Delicate; 4-sided, 4 to 12 in. long, much branched, the sprays weak and long. Leaves: Oval, opposite, sessile, black dotted beneath. Preferred Habitat - Waste places, dry fields and rides, sandy soil. Flowering Season - May-August. Distribution - Newfoundland to Florida, westward to Minnesota and Mexico.
Tiny pimpernel flowers of a reddish copper or terra cotta color have only to be seen to be named, for no other blossoms on our continent are of the same peculiar shade. Thrifty patches of the delicate little annuals have spread themselves around the civilized globe; dying down every autumn, and depending on seeds alone to keep the foothold once gained here, in Mexico and South America, Europe, Egypt, Abyssinia, Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, New Holland, Nepal, Persia, and China. What amazing travelers plants are! The blue-flowered plants are now believed to be a distinct species (A. coerulea).
Notwithstanding the fact that many birds delight to feast on the seeds, or perhaps because of it, for many must be dropped undigested, the scarlet pimpernel is one of the most widely distributed species known.
Before a storm, when the sun goes under a cloud, or on a dull day, each little weather prophet closes. A score of pretty folk names given it in every land it adopts testifies to its sensitiveness as a barometer. Under bright skies the flower may be said to open out flat at about nine in the morning and to begin to close at three in the afternoon. No nectar is secreted unless there may be some in the colored hairs which clothe the filaments. As if it knew perfectly well that however.desirable insect visitors are - and it has an excellent device for compelling them to transfer pollen - it is likewise independent of them, it takes no risk in exposing the precious vitalizing dust to wind and rain, but closes up tight, thereby bringing its pollen-laden stamens in contact with its stigma. Manifestly, it is better for a plant having aspirations to colonize the globe to set even self-fertilized seed than none at all.
HOUND'S TONGUE; GYPSY FLOWER (Cynoglossum officinale) Borage family
Flowers - Dull purplish red, about 1/3 in. across, borne in a curved raceme or panicle that straightens as the bloom advances upward. Calyx 5-parted; corolla salverform, its 5 lobes spreading; 5 stamens; 1 pistil. Stem: Erect, stout, hairy, leafy, usually branched, 1 1/2 to 3 ft. high. Leaves: Rather pale, lower ones large, oblong, slender petioled; upper ones lance-shaped, sessile, or clasping. (Thought to resemble a dog's tongue.) Preferred Habitat - Dry fields, waste places. Flowering Season - May-September. Distribution - Quebec to Minnesota, south to the Carolinas and. Kansas.
This is still another weed "naturalized from Europe" which, by contenting itself with waste land, has been able in an incredibly short time to overrun half our continent. How easy conquest of our vast unoccupied area is for weeds that have proved fittest for survival in the overcultivated Old World! Protected from the ravages of cattle by a disagreeable odor suggesting a nest of mice, and foliage that tastes even worse than it smells; by hairs on its stem that act as a light screen as well as a stockade against pilfering ants; by humps on the petals that hide the nectar from winged trespassers on the bees' and butterflies' preserves, the hound's tongue goes into the battle of life further armed with barbed seeds that sheep must carry in their fleece, and other animals, including most unwilling humans, transport to fresh colonizing ground. For a plant to shower its seeds beside itself is almost fatal; so many offspring impoverish the soil and soon choke each other to death, if, indeed, ants and such crawlers have not devoured the seeds where they lie on the ground. Some plants like the violet, jewelweed, and witch-hazel forcibly eject theirs a few inches, feet or yards. The wind blows millions about with every gust. Streams and currents of water carry others; ships and railr give free transportation to quantities among the hay used in packing; birds and animals lift many on their feet - Darwin raised 537 plants from a ball of mud carried between the toes of a snipe! - and such feathered and furred agents as feed on berries and other fruits sometimes drop the seeds a thousand miles from the parent. but it will be noticed that such vagabonds as travel by the hook or by crook method, getting a lift in the world frpm every passer-by -.burdocks, beggar-ticks, cleavers, pitchforks, Spanish needles, and scores of similar tramps that we pick off our clothing after every walk in autumn - make, perhaps, the most successful travelers on the globe. The hound's tongue's four nutlets, grouped in a pyramid, and with barbed spears as grappling-hooks, imbed themselves in our garments until they pucker the cloth. Wool growers hurl anathemas at this whole tribe of plants.
A near relative, the common VIRGINIA STICKSEED (Lappula Virginiana; C. Morisoni of Gray) produces similar little barbed nutlets, following insignificant, tiny, palest blue or white flowers up the spike. These bristling seeds, shaped like sad-irons, reflect in their title the ire of the persecuted man who named them Beggar's Lice. If as Emerson said, a weed, is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered, the hound's tongue, the similar but blue-flowered WILD COMFREY (C. Virginicum), next of kin, and the stickseed are no weeds; for ages ago the caterpillars of certain tiger moths learned to depend on their foliage as a food store,
OSWEGO TEA; BEE BALM; INDIAN'S PLUME; FRAGRANT BALM; MOUNTAIN MINT (Monarda didyma) Mint family
Flowers - Scarlet, clustered in a solitary, terminal, rounded head of dark-red calices, with leafy bracts below it. Calyx narrow, tubular, sharply 5-toothed; corolla tubular, widest at the mouth, 2-lipped, 1 1/2 to 2 inches long; 2 long, anther-bearing stamens ascending, protruding; 1 pistil; the style 2-cleft. Stem: 2 to 3 ft. tall. Leaves: Aromatic, opposite, dark green, oval to oblong lance-shaped, sharply saw-edged, often hairy beneath, petioled; upper leaves and bracts often red. Preferred Habitat - Moist soil, especially near streams, in hilly or mountainous regions. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - Canada to Georgia, west to Michigan.
Gorgeous, glowing scarlet heads of bee balm arrest the dullest eye, bracts and upper leaves often taking on blood-red color, too, as if it had dripped from the lacerated flowers. Where their vivid doubles are reflected in a shadowy mountain stream, not even the cardinal flower is more strikingly beautiful. Thrifty clumps transplanted from Nature's garden will spread about ours and add a splendor like the flowers of salvia, next of kin, if only the roots get a frequent soaking.
With even longer flower tubes than the wild bergamot's (q.v.), the bee balm belies its name, for, however frequently bees may come about for nectar when it rises high, only long-tongued bumblebees could get enough to compensate for their trouble. Butterflies, which suck with their wings in motion plumb the depths. The ruby-throated hummingbird - to which the Brazilian salvia of our gardens has adapted itself - flashes about these whorls of Indian plumes just as frequently - of course transferring pollen on his needle-like bill as he darts from flower to flower. Even the protruding stamens and pistil take on the prevailing hue. Most of the small, blue or purple flowered members of the mint family cater to bees by wearing their favorite color; the bergamot charms butterflies with magenta, and tubes so deep the short-tongued mob cannot pilfer their sweets; and from the frequency of the hummingbird's visits, from the greater depth of the bee balm's tubes and their brilliant, flaring red - an irresistibly attractive color to the ruby-throat - it would appear that this is a bird flower. Certainly its adaptation is quite as perfect as the salvia's. Mischievous bees and wasps steal nectar they cannot reach legitimately through bungholes of their own making in the bottom of the slender casks.
"This species," says Mr. Ellwanger, "is said to give a decoction but little inferior to the true tea, and was largely used as a substitute" by the Indians and the colonists, who learned from them how to brew it.
SCARLET PAINTED CUP; INDIAN PAINT-BRUSH (Castilleja coccinea) Figwort family
Flowers - Greenish yellow, enclosed by br vermilion, 3-cleft floral bracts; borne in a terminal spike. Calyx flattened, tubular, cleft above and below into 2 lobes; usually green, sometimes scarlet; corolla very irregular, the upper lip long and arched, the short lower lip 3-lobed; 4 unequal stamens; pistil. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high, usually unbranched, hairy. Leaves: Lower ones tufted, oblong, mostly uncut; stem leaves deeply cleft into 3 to 5 segments, sessile. Preferred Habitat - Meadows; prairies; moist, sandy soil; thickets. Flowering Season - May-July. Distribution - Maine to Manitoba, south to Virginia, Kansas, and Texas.
Here and there the fresh green meadows show a touch of as vivid a red as that in which Vibert delighted to dip his brush.
"Scarlet tufts Are glowing in the green like flakes of fire; The wanderers of the prairie know them well, And call that brilliant flower the 'painted cup.'"
Thoreau, who objected to this name, thought flame flower a better one, the name the Indians gave to Oswego tea; but here the floral bracts, not the flowers themselves, are on fire. Lacking good, honest, deep green, one suspects from the yellowish tone of calices, stem, and leaves, that this plant is something of a thief. That it still possesses foliage, proves only petty larceny against it, similar to the foxglove's (q.v.). Caterpillars of certain checker-spot butterflies in turn prey upon Castilleja. Under cover of darkness, in the soil below, the roots of our painted cup occasionally break in and steal from the roots of its neighbors such juices as the plant must work over into vegetable tissue. Therefore it still needs leaves, indispensable parts of a digestive apparatus. Were it wholly given up to piracy, like the dodder, or as parasitic as the Indian pipe, even the green and the leaf that it hath would be taken away from this slothful servant.
But even without honest leaf green (chlorophyll), we know that plants as low in the scale as fungi often take on the most brilliant of yellows and reds. In the painted cup the bracts, which enfold the insignificant yellowish cloistered flowers like a cape, render them great service in attracting the ruby-throated hummingbird by donning his favorite color. No lip landing place is provided for insects, as in other members of the figwort family dependent on bees; although bumblebees, which desire one, and butterflies, which suck with their wings in motion, may be rarely caught robbing the short tubes. Among the wild flowers, only the columbine, with an almost parallel blooming season, rivals the painted cup for the bird's beneficent attentions. The latter flowers at about the time the ruby-throat flashes northward out of the tropics to spend the summer. Professor Robertson of Illinois says, "In 1886 the first hummingbird seen was on May 5, visiting the Castilleja."
WOOD BETONY; LOUSEWORT; BEEFSTEAK PLANT; HIGH HEAL-ALL {Pedicularis Canadensis) Figwort family
Flowers - Greenish yellow and purplish red, in a short dense spike. Calyx oblique, tubular, cleft on lower side, and with 2 or 3 scallops on upper; corolla about 3/4 in. long, 2-lipped, the upper lip arched, concave, the lower 3-lobed; 4 stamens in pairs; 1 pistil. Stems: Clustered, simple, hairy, 6 to 18 in. high. Leaves: Mostly tufted, oblong lance-shaped in outline, and pinnately lobed. Preferred Habitat - Dry, open woods and thickets. Flowering Season - April-June. Distribution - Nova Scotia to Florida, westward to Manitoba, Colorado, and Kansas.
When the Italians wish to extol someone they say, "He has more virtues than betony," alluding, of course, to the European species, Betonica officinalis, a plant that was worn about the neck and cultivated in cemeteries during the Middle Ages as a charm against evil spirits; and prepared into plasters, ointments, syrups, and oils, was supposed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to. Our commonest American species fulfils its mission in beautifying ride banks and dry, open woods and copses with thick, short spikes of bright flowers, that rise above large rosettes of coarse, hairy, fern-like foliage. At first, these flowers, beloved of bumblebees, are all greenish yellow; but as the spike lengthens with increased bloom, the arched, upper lip of the blossom becomes dark purplish red, the lower one remains pale yellow, and the throat turns reddish, while some of the beefsteak color often creeps into stems and leaves as well.
Farmers once believed that after their sheep fed on the foliage of this group of plants a skin disease, produced by a certain tiny louse (pediculus), would attack them - hence our innocent betony's repellent name.
BEECH-DROPS (Septamnium Virginianum; Epifegus Virginiana of Gray) Broom-rape family
Flowers - Small, dull purple and white, tawny, or brownish striped; scattered along loose, tiny bracted, ascending branches. Stem: Brownish or reddish tinged, slender, tough, branching above, 6 in. to 2 ft. tall, from brittle, fibrous roots. Preferred Habitat - Under beech, oak, and chestnut trees. Flowering Season - August-October. Distribution - New Brunswick, westward to Ontario and Missouri, south to the Gulf States.
Nearly related to the broom-rape is this less attractive pirate, a taller, brownish-purple plant, with a disagreeable odor, whose erect, branching stem without leaves is still furnished with brownish scales, the remains of what were once green leaves in virtuous ancestors, no doubt. But perhaps even these relics of honesty may one day disappear. Nature brands every sinner somehow; and the loss of green from a plant's leaves may be taken as a certain indication that theft of another's food stamps it with this outward and visible sign of guilt. The grains of green to which foliage owes its color are among the most essential of products to honest vegetables that have to grub in the soil for a living, since it is only in such cells as contain it that assimilation of food can take place. As chlorophyll, or leaf-green, acts only under the influence of light and air, most plants expose all the leaf surface possible; but a parasite, which absorbs from others juices already assimilated, certainly has no use for chlorophyll, nor for leaves either; and in the broom-rape, beech-drops, and Indian pipe, among other thieves, we see leaves degenerated into bracts more or less without color, according to the extent of their crime. Now they cannot manufacture carbohydrates, even if they would, any more than fungi can.
On the beech-drop's slender branches two kinds of flowers are seated: below are the minute fertile ones, which never open, but, without imported pollen, ripen an abundance of seed with literally the closest economy. Nevertheless, to save the species from still deeper degeneracy through perpetual self-fertilization, small purplish-striped flowers above them mature stigmas and anthers on different days, and invite insect visits to help them produce a few cross-fertilized seeds. Even a few will save it. Every plant which bears cleistogamous or blind flowers - violets, wood-sorrel, jewelweed, among others - must also display some showy ones.
TRUMPET-FLOWER; TRUMPET-CREEPER (Tecoma radicans) Trumpet-creeper family
Flowers - Red and veined within, paler and inclined toward tawny without, trumpet-shaped, about 2 1/2 in. long, the limb with 5 rounded lobes; 2 to 9 flowers in the terminal clusters; anther-bearing stamens 4, in pairs, under upper part of tube; 1 pistil. Stem: A woody vine 20 to 40 ft. long, prstrate or climbing. Leaves: Opposite, pinnately compounded of 7 to 11 ovate, saw-edged leaflets. Preferred Habitat - Moist, rich woods and thickets. Flowering Season - August-September. Distribution - New Jersey and Pennsylvania, westward to Illinois, and soutb to the Gulf States. Occasionally escaped from gardens farther north.
From early May untll the middle of October, the ruby-throated hummingbird forsakes the tropics to spend the flowery months with us. Which wild flowers undertake to feed him? Years before showy flowers were brought from all corners of the earth to adorn our gardens, about half a dozen natives in that parterre of Nature's east of the Mississippi catered to him in orderly succeswsion. In feasting at their board he could not choose but reciprocate the favor by transferring their pollen as they took pains to arrange matters. Nectar and tiny insects he is ever seeking. Of course hundreds of flowers secrete nectar which taxes them little; and while the vast majority of these are avowedly adapted to insect benefactors; what is to prevent the bird's needle-like bill from probing the sweets from most of them? Certain flowers dependent on him, finding that the mere offering of nectar was not enough to insure his fidelity, that he was constantly lured away, had to offer some especially strong attractions to make his regular visits sure. How did these learn that red is irresistibly fascinating to him, and orange scarcely less so, perhaps for the sake of the red that is mixed with the yellow? Today we find such flowers as need him sorely, wearing his favorite colors. But even this delicate attention is not enough. He demands that his refreshments shall be reserved for him in a tube so deep or inaccessible that, when he calls, he will find all he desires, notwithstanding the occasional intrusion of such long-tongued insects as bumblebees, butterflies, and moths. First the long-spurred red and yellow columbine and the painted cup, then the coral honeysuckle, jewelweed, trumpet-creeper, Oswego tea, and cardinal flower have the honor of catering to the exacting little sprite from spring to autumn. His sojourn in our gardens is prolonged until his beloved gladioli, cannas, honeysuckles, nasturtiums, and salvia succumb to frost.
Where a trumpet vine climbs with the help of its aerial roots, like an ivy's, and sends forth clusters of brilliant tubes at the tips of long, wiry branches, there one is sure to see sooner or later, the ruby-throat flashing, whirring, darting from flower to flower. Eight birds at once were counted about a vine one sunny morning. The next, a pair of tame pigeons walked over the roof of the summer-house where the creeper grew luxuriantly, and punctured, with a pop that was distinctly heard fifty feet away, the base of every newly opened nectar-filled trumpet on it! That afternoon all the corollas discolored, and no hummers came near.
CORAL or TRUMPET HONEYSUCKLE (Lonicera sempervirens) Honeysuckle family
Flowers - Red outside, orange yellow within; whorled round terminal spikes. Calyx insignificant; corolla tubular, slender, 1 1/2 in. long or less, slightly spread below the 5-lobed limb; 5 stamens; 1 pistil. Stem: A high, twining vine. Leaves: Evergreen in the South only; opposite, rounded oval, dark, shining green above, the upper leaves united around the stem by their bases to form a cup. Fruit: An interrupted spike of deep orange-red berries. Preferred Habitat - Rich, light, warm soil; hillsides, thickets. Flowering Season - April-September. Distribution - Connecticut, westward to Nebraska, and south to the Gulf States. Occasionally escaped from cultivation farther north,.
Small-flowered bush honeysuckles elected to serve and be served by bees; those with longer tubes welcomed bumblebees; the white and yellow flowered twining honeysuckles, deep of tube and deliciously fragrant, especially after dark, when they are still visible, cater to the sphinx moths (see sweet wild honeysuckle); but surely the longest-tongued bumblebee could not plumb the depths of this slender-tubed trumpet honeysuckle, nor the night-flying moth discover a flower that has melted into the prevailing darkness when he begins his rounds, and takes no pains to guide him with perfume. What creature, then, does it cater to? After reading of the aims of the trumpet-flower on the preceding page, no one will be surprised to hear that the ruby-throated hummingbird's visits are responsible for most of the berries that follow these charming, generous, abundant flowers, so eminently to his liking. Larger migrants than he, in search of fare so attractive, distribute the seeds far and wide. Is any other species more wholly dependent on birds?
CARDINAL FLOWER; RED LOBELIA (Lobelia cardinalis) Bellflower family
Flowers - Rich vermilion, very rarely rose or white, 1 to 1 1/2 in, long, numerous, growing in terminal, erect, green-bracted, more or less 1-sided racemes. Calyx 5-cleft; corolla tubular, split down one side, 2-lipped; the lower lip with 3 spreading lobes, the upper lip 2-lobed, erect; 5 stamens united into a tube around the style; 2 anthers with hairy tufts. Stem: 2 to 4 1/2 ft. high, rarely branched. Leaves: Oblong to lance-shaped, slightly toothed, mostly sessile. Preferred Habitat - Wet or low ground, beside streams, ditches, and meadow runnels. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - New Brunswick to the Gulf States, westward to the Northwest Territory and Kansas.
By the depth and brilliancy of its incomparable hue, the shade with which Vibert delighted to illumine his rich canvases, the color of the famous hat worn by seventy ecclesiastical princes of the Roman Church, but a richer red than the bird which shares the name can boast, the cardinal flower proclaims its title to all beholders. Because its vivid beauty cannot be hid, and few withstand the temptation to pick it, its extermination goes on as rapidly as its bird namesake's.
"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood rose and left it on its stalk?"
The easy cultivation from seed of this peerless wildflower - and it is offered in many trade catalogues - might save it to those regions in Nature's wide garden that now know it no more. The ranks of floral missionaries need recruits.
Curious that the great blue lobelia should be the cardinal flower's twin sister! Why this difference of color? Sir John Lubbock proved by tireless experiment that the bees' favorite color is blue, and the shorter-tubed blue lobelia elected to woo them as her benefactors. Whoever has made a study of the ruby-throated hummingbird's habits must have noticed how red flowers entice him - columbines, painted cups, coral honeysuckle, Oswego tea, trumpet flower, and cardinal in Nature's garden; cannas, salvia, gladioli, pelargoniums, fuchsias, phloxes, verbenas, and nasturtiums among others in ours. How the cardinal flower's wonderful mechanism works to utilize his visits has already been told under great lobelia, in the description of the blue lobelia of similar construction. But with a bird so much greater than the ruby-throat that the jeweled-feathered atom could be concealed under one of its talons is the red lobelia forever associated:
"The cardinal, and the blood-red spots, Its double in the stream As if some wounded eagle's breast, Slow throbbing o'er the plain, Had left its airy path impressed In drops of scarlet rain."
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