Wild Flowers Part 13

Damascena), which blooms twice a year, as well as the MUSK ROSE (R. moschata), were cherished by the Semitic or Arabic stock; while the Turkish-Mongolian people planted by preference the YELLOW ROSE (R. lutea). Eastern Asia (China and j.a.pan) is the fatherland of the INDIAN and TEA ROSES."

How fragrant are the pages of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare with the Eglantine! This delicious plant, known here as SWEETBRIAR (R. rubIginosa), emits its very aromatic odor from russet glands on the under, downy side of the small leaflets, always a certain means of identification. From eastern Canada to Virginia and Tennessee the plant has happily escaped from man's gardens back to Nature's.

In spite of its American Indian name, the lovely white CHEROKEE ROSE (R. Sinica), that runs wild in the South, climbing, rambling and rioting with a truly Oriental abandon and luxuriance, did indeed come from China. Would that our northern thickets and roadsides might be decked with its pure flowers and almost equally beautiful dark, glossy, evergreen leaves!

COMMON RED, PURPLE, MEADOW, or HONEYSUCKLE CLOVER (Trifolium pratense) Pea family

Flowers - Magenta, pink, or rarely whitish, sweet-scented, the tubular corollas set in dense round, oval, or egg-shaped heads about 1 in. long, and seated in a sparingly hairy calyx. Stem: 6 in. to 2 ft. high, branching, reclining, or erect, more or less hairy. Leaves: On long petioles, commonly compounded of 3, but sometimes of 4 to 11 oval or oblong leaflets, marked with white crescent, often dark-spotted near center; stipules egg-shaped, sharply pointed, strongly veined, over 1/2 in. long.

Preferred Habitat - Fields, meadows, roadsides.

Flowering Season - April-November.

Distribution - Common throughout Canada and United States.

Meadows bright with clover-heads among the gra.s.ses, daisies, and b.u.t.tercups in June resound with the murmur of unwearying industry and rapturous enjoyment. b.u.mblebees by the tens of thousands buzzing above acres of the farmer's clover blossoms should be happy in a knowledge of their benefactions, which doubtless concern them not at all. They have never heard the story of the Australians who imported quant.i.ties of clover for fodder, and had glorious fields of it that season, but not a seed to plant next year's crops, simply because the farmers had failed to import the b.u.mblebee. After her immigration the clovers multiplied prodigiously. No; the bee's happiness rests on her knowledge that only the b.u.t.terflies' long tongues can honestly share with her the br.i.m.m.i.n.g wells of nectar in each tiny floret. Children who have sucked them too appreciate her rapture. If we examine a little flower under the magnifying gla.s.s, we shall see why its structure places it in the pea family. b.u.mblebees so depress the keel either when they sip, or feed on pollen, that their heads and tongues get well dusted with the yellow powder, which they transfer to the stigmas of other flowers; whereas the b.u.t.terflies are of doubtful value, if not injurious, since their long, slender tongues easily drain the nectar without depressing the keel. Even if a few grains of pollen should cling to their tongues, it would probably be wiped off as they withdrew them through the narrow slit, where the petals nearly meet, at the mouth of the flower. Bombus terrestris delights in nipping holes at the base of the tube, which other pilferers also profit by.

Our country is so much richer in b.u.t.terflies than Europe, it is scarcely surprising that Professor Robertson found thirteen Lepidoptera out of twenty insect visitors to this clover in Illinois, whereas Muller caught only eight b.u.t.terflies on it out of a list of thirty-nine visitors in Germany. The fritillaries and the sulphurs are always seen about the clover fields among many others, and the "dusky wings" and the caterpillar of several species feeds almost exclusively on this plant.

"To live in clover," from the insect's point of view at least, may well mean a life of luxury and affluence. Most peasants in Europe will tell you that a dream about the flower foretells not only a happy marriage, but long life and prosperity. For ages the clover has been counted a mystic plant, and all sorts of good and bad luck were said to attend the finding of variations of its leaves which had more than the common number of leaflets. At evening these leaflets fold downward, the side ones like two hands clasped in prayer, the end one bowed over them. In this fas.h.i.+on the leaves of the white and other clovers also go to sleep, to protect their sensitive surfaces from cold by radiation, it is thought.

The ZIG-ZAG CLOVER, COW or MARL-GRa.s.s (T. Medium), a native of Europe and Asia, now naturalized in the eastern half of the United States and Canada, may scarcely be told from the common red clover, except by its crooked, angular stems - often provokingly straight - by its unspotted leaves, and the short peduncle in which its heads are elevated above the calyx.

Farmers here are beginning to learn the value of the beautiful CRIMSON, CARNATION or ITALIAN CLOVER or NAPOLEONS (T.

incarnatum), and happily there are many fields and waste places in the East already harboring the brilliant runaways. The narrow heads may be two and a half inches long. A meadow of this fodder plant makes one envious of the very cattle that may spend the summer day wading through acres of its deep bright bloom.

GOAT'S RUE; CAT-GUT; h.o.a.rY PEA or WILD SWEET PEA (Cracca Virginiana; Tephrosia Virginiana of Gray) Pea family

Flowers - In terminal cl.u.s.ter, each 1/2 in. long or over, b.u.t.terfly-shaped, consisting of greenish, cream-yellow standard, purplish-rose wings, and curved keel of greenish yellow tinged with rose; petals clawed; 10 stamens (9 and 1); calyx 5-toothed.

Stem: h.o.a.ry, with white, silky hairs, rather woody, 1 to 2 feet high. Leaves: Compounded of 7 to 25 oblong leaflets. Root: Long, fibrous, tough. Fruit: A h.o.a.ry, narrow pod, to 2 in. long.

Preferred Habitat - Dry, sandy soil, edges of pine woods.

Flowering Season - June-July.

Distribution - Southern New England, westward to Minnesota, south to Florida, Louisiana, and Mexico.

Flowers far less showy and attractive than this denizen of sandy wastelands, a cousin of the wisteria vine and the locust tree, have been introduced to American gardens. Striking its long fibrous root deep into the dry soil, the plant spreads in thrifty clumps through heat and drought - and so tough are its fibers they might almost be used for violin strings. As in the case of the lupine, the partridge pea and certain others akin to it, the leaves of the h.o.a.ry pea "go to sleep" at night, but after a manner of their own, i.e., by lying along the stem and turning on their own bases.

In similar situations from New York south and southwestward, the MILK PEA (Galactia regularis; G. glabella of Gray) lies prostrate along the ground, the matted, usually branched stems sending up at regular intervals a raceme of rose-purple flowers in July and August from the axil of the trefoliate leaf.

TRAILING BUSH CLOVER (Lespedeza proc.u.mbens) Pea family

Flowers - Purplish pink or violet, veined, the b.u.t.terfly-shaped ones having standard petal, wings, and keel, cl.u.s.tered at end of peduncles; the minute flowers lacking a corolla, nearly sessile.

Calyx of 5 slender, nearly equal lobes. Stems: Prostrate, trailing, or sometimes ascending, woolly or downy, leafy. Leaves: Clover-like, trefoliate. Fruit: A very small, hairy, flat, rounded, acute pod.

Preferred Habitat - Dry soil open, sandy places.

Flowering Season - August-September.

Distribution - Ma.s.sachusetts to the Gulf, and westward to the Mississippi.

Springing upward from a ma.s.s of clover-like leaves, these showy little blossoms elevate themselves to arrest, not our attention, but the notice of the pa.s.sing bee. As the claw of the standard petal and the calyx are short, he need not have a long tongue to drain the nectary pointed out to him by a triangular white mark at the base of the banner. Now, as his weight depresses the incurved keel, wherein the vital organs are protected, the stigma strikes the visitor in advance of the anthers, so that pollen brought on his underside from another flower must come off on this one before he receives fresh pollen to transfer to a third blossom. At first the keel returns to its original position when depressed; later it loses its elasticity. But besides these showy flowers intended to be cross-fertilized by insects, the bush clovers bear, among the others, insignificant-looking, tightly closed, bud-like ones that produce abundant self-fertilized seed.

The petaliferous flowers are simply to counteract the inevitable evils resulting from close inbreeding. One usually finds caterpillars of the "dusky wings" b.u.t.terfly feeding on the foliage and the similar tick trefoils which are its staple. At night the bush clover leaves turn upward, completely changing the aspect of these plants as we know them by day. Michaux named the group of flowers for his patron, Lespedez, a governor of Florida under the Spanish regime.

Perhaps the commonest of the tribe is the VIOLET BUSH CLOVER (L.

violacea), a variable, branching, erect, or spreading plant, sometimes only a foot high, or again three times as tall. Its thin leaves are more elliptic than the decidedly clover-like ones of the preceding species; its rose-purple flowers are more loosely cl.u.s.tered, and the stems are only sparingly hairy, never woolly.

On the top of the erect, usually unbranched, but very leafy stem of the WAND-LIKE BUSH CLOVER (L. frutescens), the two kinds of flowers grow in a crowded cl.u.s.ter, and more sparingly from the axils below. The clover-like leaflets, dark green and smooth above, are paler and hairy below. Like the rest of its kin, this bush clover delights in dry soil, particularly in open, sandy places near woods of pine and oak. One readily distinguishes the SLENDER BUSH CLOVER (L. Virginica) by the very narrowly oblong leaves along its wand, which bears two kinds of bright rose flowers, cl.u.s.tered at the top chiefly, and in the axils.

Yellowish-white flowers, about a quarter of an inch long, and with a purplish-rose spot on the standard petal to serve as a pathfinder to the nectary, are crowded in oblong spikes an inch and a half long or less on the HAIRY BUSH CLOVER (L. hirta). The stem, which may attain four feet, or half that height, is usually branched; and the entire plant is often downy to the point of silkiness.

Dense cl.u.s.ters of the yellowish-white flowers of the ROUND-HEADED BUSH CLOVER (L. capitata) are seated in the upper axils of the silvery-hairy, wand-like stem. Pink streaks at the base of the standard petal serve as pathfinders, and its infolded edges guide the bee's tongue straight to the opening in the stamen tube through which he sucks.

WILD or SPOTTED GERANIUM or CRANE'S-BILL; ALUM-ROOT (Geranium maculatum) Geranium family

Flowers - Pale magenta, purplish pink, or lavender, regular, 1 to 1 1/2 in. broad, solitary or a pair, borne on elongated peduncles, generally with pair of leaves at their base. Calyx of 5 lapping, pointed sepals; 5 petals, woolly at base; 10 stamens; pistil with 5 styles. Fruit: A slender capsule pointed like a crane's bill. In maturity it ejects seeds elastically far from the parent plant. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high, hairy, slender, simple or branching above. Leaves: Older ones sometimes spotted with white; basal ones 3 to 6 in. wide, 3 to 5 parted, variously cleft and toothed; 2 stem leaves opposite.

Preferred Habitat - Open woods, thickets, and shady roadsides.

Flowering Season - April-July.

Distribution - Newfoundland to Georgia, and westward a thousand miles.

Sprengel, who was the first to exalt flowers above the level of mere botanical specimens, had his attention led to the intimate relations.h.i.+p existing between plants and insects by studying out the meaning of the hairy corolla of the common wild geranium of Germany (G. sylvatic.u.m), being convinced, as he wrote in 1787, that "the wise Author of Nature has not made even a single hair without a definite design." A hundred years before, Nehemias Grew had said that it was necessary for pollen to reach the stigma of a flower in order that it might set fertile seed; and Linnaeus had to come to his aid with conclusive evidence to convince a doubting world that this was true. Sprengel made the next step forward, but his writings lay neglected over seventy years because he advanced the then incredible and only partially true statement that a flower is fertilized by insects which carry its pollen from its anthers to its stigma. In spite of his discoveries that the hairs inside the geranium's corolla protect its nectar from rain for the insect's benefit, just as eyebrows keep perspiration from falling into the eye; that most flowers which secrete nectar have what he termed "honey guides" - spots of bright color, heavy veining, or some such pathfinder on the petals - in spite of the most patient and scientific research that shed great light on natural selection a half-century before Darwin advanced the theory, he left it for the author of "The Origin of Species" to show that cross-fertilization - the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another, not from anthers to stigma of the same flower - is the great end to which so much marvelous mechanism is chiefly adapted. Cross-fertilized blossoms defeat self-fertilized flowers in the struggle for existence.

No wonder Sprengel's theory was disproved by his scornful contemporaries in the very case of his wild geranium, which sheds its pollen before it has developed a stigma to receive any; therefore no insect that had not brought pollen from an earlier bloom could possibly fertilize this flower. How amazing that he did not see this! Our common wild crane's-bill, which also has lost the power to fertilize itself, not only ripens first the outer, then the inner, row of anthers, but actually drops them off after their pollen has been removed, to overcome the barest chance of self-fertilization as the stigmas become receptive.

This is the geranium's and many other flowers' method to compel cross-fertilization by insects. In cold, stormy, cloudy weather a geranium blossom may remain in the male stage several days before becoming female; while on a warm, sunny day, when plenty of insects are flying, the change sometimes takes place in a few hours. Among others, the common sulphur or puddle b.u.t.terfly, that sits in swarms on muddy roads and makes the clover fields gay with its bright little wings, pilfers nectar from the geranium without bringing its long tongue in contact with the pollen.

Neither do the smaller bees and flies which alight on the petals necessarily come in contact with the anthers and stigmas.

Doubtless the larger bees are the flowers' true benefactors.

The so-called geraniums in cultivation are pelargoniums, strictly speaking.

In barren soil, from Canada to the Gulf, and far westward, the CAROLINA CRANE'S-BILL (G. Carolinianum), an erect, much-branched little plant resembling the spotted geranium in general features, bears more compact cl.u.s.ters of pale rose or whitish flowers, barely half an inch across. As their inner row of anthers comes very close to the stigmas, spontaneous self-fertilization may sometimes occur; although in fine weather small bees, especially, visit them constantly. The beak of the seed vessel measures nearly an inch long.

HERB ROBERT; RED ROBIN; RED SHANKS; DRAGON'S BLOOD (Geranium Robertianum) Geranium family

Flowers - Purplish rose, about 1/2 in. across, borne chiefly in pairs on slender peduncles. Five sepals and petals; stamens 10; pistil with 5 styles. Stem: Weak, slender, much branched, forked, and spreading, slightly hairy, 6 to i8 in. high. Leaves: Strongly scented, opposite, thin, of 3 divisions, much subdivided and cleft. Fruit: Capsular, elastic, the beak 1 in. long, awn-pointed.

Preferreed Habitat - Rocky, moist woods and shady roadsides Flowering Season - May-October Distribution - Nova Scotia to Pennsylvania, and westward to Missouri.

Who was the Robert for whom this his "holy herb" was named? Many suppose that he was St. Robert, a Benedictine monk, to whom the twenty-ninth of April - the day the plant comes into flower in Europe - is dedicated. Others a.s.sert that Robert Duke of Normandy, for whom the "Ortus Sanitatis," a standard medical guide for some hundred of years, was written, is the man honored; and since there is now no way of deciding the mooted question, we may take our choice.

Only when the stems are young are they green; later the plant well earns the name of red shanks, and when its leaves show crimson stains, of dragon's blood.

At any time the herb gives forth a disagreeable odor, but especially when its leaves and stem have been crushed until they emit a resinous secretion once an alleged cure for the plague.

Flies, that never object to a noxious smell, constantly visit the flower, and have their tongues guided through pa.s.sages between little ridge-like processes on each petal to the nectar secreted by the base of the filaments at the base of each sepal. To prevent self-fertilization the five stigmas are folded close together when the flower opens, nor do they spread apart and become receptive until after the outer row of anthers, then the inner row, have shed their pollen. When the elastic carpels have ripened their seed, bang! go the little guns, scattering them far and wide.

WHITE OR TRUE WOOD~SORREL; ALLELULA (Oxalis acetosella) Wood-sorrel family

Flowers - White or delicate pink, veined with deep pink, about 1/2 in. long. Five sepals; 5 spreading petals rounded at tips; 10 stamens, 5 longer, 5 shorter, all anther-bearing; 1 pistil with 5 stigmatic styles. Scape: Slender, leafless, 1-flowered, 2 to 5 in, high. Leaf: Clover-like, of 3 leaflets, on long petioles from scaly, creeping rootstock.

Preferred Habitat - Cold, damp woods.

Flowering Season - May-July.

Distribution - Nova Scotia and Manitoba, southward to North Carolina. Also a native of Europe.

Clumps of these delicate little pinkish blossoms and abundant leaves, cuddled close to the cold earth of northern forests, usually conceal near the dry leaves or moss from which they spring blind flowers that never open - cleistogamous the botanists call them - flowers that lack petals, as if they were immature buds; that lack odor, nectar, and entrance; yet they are perfectly mature, self-fertilized, and abundantly fruitful.

Fifty-five genera of plants contain one or more species on which these peculiar products are found, the pea family having more than any other, although violets offer perhaps the most familiar instance to most of us. Many of these species bury their offspring below ground; but the wood-sorrel bears its blind flowers nodding from the top of a curved scape at the base of the plant, where we can readily find them. By having no petals, and other features a.s.sumed by an ordinary flower to attract insects, and chiefly in saving pollen, they produce seed with literally the closest economy. It is estimated that the average blind flower of the wood-sorrel does its work with four hundred pollen grains, while the prodigal peony scatters with the help of wind and insect visitors over three and a half millions!