Wild Flowers Part 17

Preferred Habitat - Rich soil, meadows, thickets.

Flowering Season - July-August.

Distribution - New York to Florida, westward to Ontario, Michigan, and Indian Territory.

During the drought of midsummer the lovely rose-pink blooms inland with cheerful readiness to adapt itself to harder conditions than most of its moisture-loving kin will tolerate; but it may be noticed that although we may oftentimes find it growing in dry soil, it never spreads in such luxuriant cl.u.s.ters as when the roots are struck beside meadow runnels and ditches.

Probably the plant would be commoner than it is about populous Eastern districts were it not so much sought after as a tonic medicine.

It was the Centaurea, represented here by the blue ragged sailor of gardens, and not our Centaury, a distinctly American group of plants, which, Ovid tells us, cured a wound in the foot of the Centaur Chiron, made by an arrow hurled by Hercules.

Three exquisite members of the Sabbatia tribe keep close to the Atlantic coast in salt meadows and marshes, along the borders of brackish rivers, and very rarely in the sand at the edges of fresh-water ponds a little way inland. From Maine to Florida they range, and less frequently are met along the sh.o.r.es of the Gulf of Mexico so far as Louisiana. How bright and dainty and are!

Whole meadows are radiant with their blushing lovliness. Probably if they consented to live far away from the sea, they would lose some of the deep, clear pink from out their lovely petals, since all flowers show a tendency to brighten their colors as they approach the coast. In England some of the same wildflowers we have here are far deeper-hued, owing, no doubt to the fact that they live on a sea-girt, moisture-laden island, and also that the sun never scorches and blanches at the far north as it does in the United States.

As might be expected, blossoms so bright of hue as the marsh pinks attract many insects. Guided by the yellow eye that serves as a pathfinder to the nectary, they feast on the generour supply of sweets; but all unwittingly they must pay for their entertainment by carrying pollen from early to later flowers.

Like so many other blossoms, the sabbatias guard themselves against the evils of self-fertilization by shedding their pollen before they mature and spread their two-cleft style, which is now ready to receive the golden, quickening dust on its stigmatic inner surfaces.

The SEA or MARSH PINK, or ROSE OF PLYMOUTH (S. stellaris), whose graceful alternate branching stem attains a height of two feet only under most favorable conditions, from July to September opens a succession of pink flowers that often fade to white. The yellow eye is bordered with carmine. They measure about one inch across, and are usually solitary at the ends of branches, or else sway on slender peduncles from the axils. The upper leaves are narrow and bract-like; those lower down gradually widen as they approach the root.

Similar to the Rose of Plymouth is the even more graceful SLENDER MARSH PINK (S. Campanulata - the S. gracilis of Gray), whose upper leaves are almost thread-like in their narrowness. Its five calyx lobes, too, are exceedingly slender, and often as long as the corolla lobes. One of our soldiers in Cuba, during the Spanish War, sent home to his sister in Ma.s.sachusetts some of these same little flowers in a letter. "You would just love to see the marshes here," he wrote. "They are filled with beautiful little pink flowers. I wish I knew their names." That soldier had pa.s.sed by New England marshes aglow with the blossoms all his life, but he had never noticed them until all his perceptions became quickened by the stimulus of travel and the excitement of war. How blind and deaf we all are in some directions; having eyes we see not, and ears we hear not, in the natural as in the spiritual realm.

No danger of confusing the LARGE MARSH PINK (S. dodecandra - S.

chloroides of Gray) with its smaller, more branching relatives.

It displays few flowers to a plant, but each measures two and a half inches or less across, and has from nine to twelve pink (or rarely white) petals. This sabbatia often chooses the sandy borders of ponds for its habitat.

SPREADING DOGBANE; FLY-TRAP DOGBANE; HONEY-BLOOM; BITTER-ROOT (Apocynum androsaemifolium) Dogbane family

Flowers - Delicate pink, veined with a deeper shade, fragrant, bell-shaped, about 1/3 in. across, borne in loose terminal cymes.

Calyx 5-parted; corolla of 5 spreading, recurved lobes united into a tube; within the tube 5 tiny, triangular appendages alternate with stamens; the arrow-shaped anthers united around the stigma and slightly adhering to it. Stem: 1 to 4 ft. high, with forking, spreading, leafy branches. Leaves: Opposite, entire-edged, broadly oval, narrow at base, paler, and more or less hairy below. Fruit: Two pods about 4 in. long.

Preferred Habitat - Fields, thickets, beside roads, lanes, and walls.

Flowering Season - June-July.

Distribution - Northern part of British Possessions south to Georgia, westward to Nebraska.

Everywhere at the North we come across this interesting, rather shrubby plant, with its pretty but inconspicuous little rose-veined bells suggesting pink lilies-of-the-valley. Now that we have learned to read the faces of flowers, as it were, we instantly suspect by the color, fragrance, pathfinders, and structure that these are artful wilers, intent on gaining ends of their own through their insect admirers. What are they up to?

Let us watch. Bees, flies, moths, and b.u.t.terflies, especially the latter, hover near. Alighting, the b.u.t.terfly visitor unrolls his long tongue and inserts it where the five pink veins tell him to, for five nectar-bearing glands stand in a ring around the base of the pistil. Now, as he withdraws his slender tongue through one of the V-shaped cavities that make a circle of traps, he may count himself lucky to escape with no heavier toll imposed than pollen cemented to it. This granular dust he is required to rub off against the stigma of the next flower entered. Some bees, too, have been taken with the dogbane's pollen cemented to their tongues. But suppose a fly call upon this innocent-looking blossom? His short tongue, as well as the b.u.t.terfly's, is guided into one of the V-shaped cavities after he has sipped; but, getting wedged between the trap's h.o.r.n.y teeth, the poor little victim is held a prisoner there until he slowly dies of starvation in sight of plenty. This is the penalty he must pay for trespa.s.sing on the b.u.t.terfly's preserves! The dogbane, which is perfectly adapted to the b.u.t.terfly, and dependent upon it for help in producing fertile seed, ruthlessly destroys all poachers that are not big or strong enough to jerk away from its vise-like grasp. One often sees small flies and even moths dead and dangling by the tongue from the wicked little charmers. If the flower a.s.similated their dead bodies as the pitcher plant, for example, does those of its victims, the fly's fate would seem less cruel. To be killed by slow torture and dangled like a scarecrow simply for pilfering a drop of nectar is surely an execution of justice medieval in its severity.

In July the most splendid of our native beetles, the green dandy (Eumolpus auratus) fastens itself to the dogbane's foliage in numbers until often the leaves appear to be studded with these brilliant little jewels. "It is not easy," says William Hamilton Gibson, "to describe its burnished hue, which is either shimmering green, or peac.o.c.k blue, or purplish-green, or refulgent ruby, according to the position in which it rests." But it is not golden, as its specific name would imply. It confines itself exclusively to the dogbane. To prevent capture, it has a trick of drawing up its legs and rolling off into the gra.s.s its body so cleverly matches.

>From the silky coma on which the small seeds float away from long pods to found new colonies, from the opposite leaves, milky juice, and certain structural resemblances in the flowers, one might guess this plant belonged to the milkweed tribe. Formerly it was so cla.s.sed; and although the botanists have now removed its family one step away, the milkweed b.u.t.terflies, especially the Monarch (Anosia plexippus), ignoring the arbitrary dividing line of man, still includes the dogbane on its visiting list. We know that this plant derived its name from the fact that it was considered poisonous to dogs; and we also know that all the tribe of milkweed b.u.t.terflies are provided with protective secretions which are distasteful to birds and predaceous insects, enjoying their immunity from attack, it is thought, from the acrid, poisonous character of the foliage on which the caterpillars feed.

COMMON MIIKWEED or SILKWEED (Asclepias Syriaca; A. cornuti of Gray) Milkweed family

Flowers - Dull pale greenish purple pink, or brownish pink, borne on pedicels, in many flowered, broad umbels. Calyx inferior, 5-parted; corolla deeply 5-cleft, the segments turned backward.

Above them an erect, 5-parted crown, each part called a hood, containing a nectary, and with a tooth on either side, and an incurved horn projecting from within. Behind the crown the short, stout stamens, united by their filaments in a tube, are inserted on the corolla. Broad anthers united around a thick column of pistils terminating in a large, sticky, 5-angled disk. The anther sacs tipped with a winged membrane; a waxy, pear-shaped pollen-ma.s.s in each sac connected with the stigma in pairs or fours by a dark gland, and suspended by a stalk like a pair of saddle-bags. Stem: Stout, leafy, usually unbranched, 3 to 5 ft.

high, juice milky. Leaves: Opposite, oblong, entire-edged smooth above, hairy below, 4 to 9 in. long. Fruit: 2 thick, warty pods, usually only one filled with compressed seeds attached to tufts of silky, white, fluffy hairs.

Preferred Habitat - Fields and waste places, roadsides.

Flowering Season - June-September Distribution - New Brunswick, far westward and southward to North Carolina and Kansas.

After the orchids, no flowers show greater executive ability, none have adopted more ingenious methods of compelling insects to work for them than the milkweeds. Wonderfully have they perfected their mechanism in every part until no member of the family even attempts to fertilize itself; hence their triumphal, vigorous march around the earth, the tribe numbering over nineteen hundred species located chiefly in those tropical and warm, temperate regions that teem with insect life.

Commonest of all with us is this rank weed, which possesses the dignity of a rubber plant. Much more attractive to human eyes, at least, than the dull, pale, brownish-pink umbels of flowers are its exquisite silky seed-tufts. But not so with insects. Knowing that the slightly fragrant blossoms are rich in nectar, bees, wasps, flies, beetles, and b.u.t.terflies come to feast. Now, the visitor finding his alighting place slippery, his feet claw about in all directions to secure a hold, just as it was planned they should for in his struggles some of his feet must get caught in the fine little clefts at the base of the flower. His efforts to extricate his foot only draw it into a slot at the end of which lies a little dark-brown body. In a newly opened flower five of these little bodies may be seen between the horns of the crown, at equal distances around it. This tiny brown excrescence is hard and h.o.r.n.y, with a notch in its face. It is continuous with and forms the end of the slot in which the visitor's foot is caught.

Into this he must draw his foot or claw, and finding it rather tightly held, must give a vigorous jerk to get it free. Attached to either side of the little h.o.r.n.y piece is a flattened yellow pollen-ma.s.s, and so away he flies with a pair of these pollinia, that look like tiny saddle-bags, dangling from his feet. One might think that such rough handling as many insects must submit to from flowers would discourage them from making any more visits; but the desire for food is a mighty pa.s.sion. While the insect is flying off to another blossom, the stalk to which the saddlebags are attached twists until it brings them together, that, when his feet get caught in other slots, they may be in the position to get broken off in his struggles for freedom precisely where they will fertilize the stigmatic chambers. Now the visitor flies away with the stalks alone sticking to his claws.

b.u.mblebees and hive-bees have been caught with a dozen pollen-ma.s.ses dangling from a single foot. Outrageous imposition!

Does this wonderful mechanism always work to perfection? Alas!

no. It is a common thing to find dead hive-bees and flies hanging from the flowers. While still struggling to escape, the unhappy victims will be attacked by ants, beetles, and spiders, or killed by heavy showers. Larger and stronger insects than honeybees are required to regularly effect pollination and free themselves, especially when they are so unfortunate as to catch several feet in the grooves. Doubtless it is the b.u.mblebee that can transfer pollen with impunity; but very many other insects, not perfectly adapted to the flowers, occasionally benefit them. Among the large b.u.t.terflies the Papilios, which suck with their wings in motion, are the most useful, because in using their legs to offset the motion of their wings they rapidly repeat those movements which are necessary to draw the pollinia from the anther cells and insert them in the stigmatic chambers of other flowers. "Large b.u.t.terflies like Danais," says Professor Robertson, "hold their wings still in sucking, spending more time on an umbel, but generally carrying pollinia. Small b.u.t.terflies are worse than useless. They remain long on the umbels sucking, but resting their feet superficially on the flowers.

Since several moths were found entrapped, pollination must often be brought about by night-flying Lepidoptera. As a rule, Diptera (flies) either do not transfer pollinia at all, or become hopelessly entangled when they do. "Occasionally pollen-ma.s.ses are found on the tongues of insects, especially on those of bees and wasps, which move about with their unruly member sticking out. Probably no one has ever made the exhaustive and absorbingly interesting study of the milkweeds that Professor Robertson has.

Better than any written description of the milkweed blossom's mechanism is a simple experiment. If you have neither time nor patience to sit in the hot sun, magnifying gla.s.s in hand, and watch for an unwary insect to get caught, take an ordinary housefly, and hold it by the wings so that it may claw at one of the newly opened flowers from which no pollinia have been removed. It tries frantically to hold on, and with a little direction it may be led to catch its claws in the slots of the flower. Now pull it gently away, and you will find a pair of saddlebags slung over his foot by a slender curved stalk. If you are rarely skilful, you may induce your fly to withdraw the pollinia from all five slots on as many of his feet. And they are not to be thrown or sc.r.a.ped off, let the fly try as hard as he pleases. You may now invite the fly to take a walk on another flower in which he will probably leave one or more pollinia in its stigmatic cavities.

Dr. Kerner thought the milky juice in milkweed plants, especially abundant in the uppermost leaves and stems, serves to protect the flowers from useless crawling pilferers. He once started a number of ants to climb up a milky stalk. When they neared the summit, he noticed that at each movement the terminal hooks of their feet cut through the tender epiderm, and from the little clefts the milky juice began to flow, bedraggling their feet and the hind part of their bodies. "The ants were much impeded in their movements," he writes, "and in order to rid themselves of the annoyance, drew their feet through their mouths. Their movements however, which accompanied these efforts, simply resulted in making fresh fissures and fresh discharges of milky juice, so that the position of the ants became each moment worse and worse.

Many escaped by getting to the edge of a leaf and dropping to the ground. Others tried this method of escape too late, for the air soon hardened the milky juice into a tough brown substance, and after this, all the strugglings of the ants to free themselves from the viscid matter were in vain." Nature's methods of preserving a flower's nectar for the insects that are especially adapted to fertilize it, and of punishing all useless intruders, often shock us yet justice is ever stern, ever kind in the largest sense.

If the asclepias really do kill some insects with their juice, others doubtless owe their lives to it. Among the "protected"

insects are the milkweed b.u.t.terflies and their caterpillars, which are provided with secretions that are distasteful to birds and predaceous insects. "These acrid secretions are probably due to the character of the plants upon which the caterpillars feed,"

says Dr. Holland, in his beautiful and invaluable "b.u.t.terfly Book." "Enjoying on this account immunity from attack, they have all, in the process of time, been mimicked by species in other genera which have not the same immunity." "One cannot stay long around a patch of milkweeds without seeing the monarch b.u.t.terfly.

(Anosia plexippus), that splendid, bright, reddish-brown winged fellow, the borders and veins broadly black, with two rows of white spots on the outer borders and two rows of pale spots across the tip of the fore wings. There is a black scent-pouch on the hind wings. The caterpillar, which is bright yellow or greenish yellow, banded with shining black, is furnished with black fleshy 'horns' fore and aft."

Like the dandelion, thistle, and other triumphant strugglers for survival, the milkweed sends its offspring adrift on the winds to found fresh colonies afar. Children delight in making pompons for their hats by removing the silky seed-tufts from pods before they burst, and winding them, one by one, on slender stems with fine thread. Hung in the sunshine, how charmingly fluffy and soft they dry!

Among the comparatively few b.u.t.terfly flowers - although, of course, other insects not adapted to them are visitors - is the PURPLE MILKWEED (A. purpurasceus), whose deep magenta umbels are so conspicuous through the summer months. Hummingbirds occasionally seek it too. From Eastern Ma.s.sachusetts to Virginia, and westward to the Mississippi, or beyond, it is to be found in dry fields, woods, and thickets.

The SWAMP MILKWEED (A. incarnata), on the other hand, rears its intense purplish-red or pinkish hoods in wet places. Its leaves are lance-shaped or oblong-lanceolate, whereas the purple milkweed's leaves are oblong or ovate-oblong. This is a smooth plant; and a similar species once reckoned as a mere variety (A.

pulchra) is the HAIRY MILKWEED. It differs chiefly in having some hairs on the under side of its leaves, and a great many hairs on its stem. Both plants bear erect, rather slender, tapering pods.

The POKE or TALL MILKWEED (A. exaltata - A. phytolaecoides of Gray) may attain a height of six feet if the moist soil in which it grows be exactly to its liking. Drooping or spreading umbels of flowers whose corolla segments are pale purplish green, and whose crown is clear ivory white or pink, appear from June to August from Maine to Georgia and far westward. Sometimes the tapering oblong leaves may be nine inches long. The erect seedpods are drawn out to an unusually long point.

One may always distinguish the low-growing FOUR-LEAVED MILKWEED (A. quadrifolia) from its relatives of ranker growth by its general air of refinement, as well as by the two pairs of thin, tapering leaves that grow in an upright whorl near the middle of the slender stem. Usually there are no leaves on the lower part.

Small terminal umbels of delicate pink and white fragrant flowers, which appear from May till July, give place to very narrow pointed pods in late summer. From Maine to Ontario southward to North Carolina and Arkansas is its range, in woods and thickets chiefly.

HEDGE or GREAT BINDWEED; WILD MORNING-GLORY; RUTLAND BEAUTY; BELL-BIND; LADY'S NIGHTCAP

(Convolvulus sepium; Calystegia sepium of Gray) Morning-glory family

Flowers - Light pink, with white stripes or all white, bell-shaped, about 2 in. long, twisted in the bud, solitary, on long peduncles from leaf axils. Calyx of 5 sepals, concealed by 2 large bracts at base. Corolla 5-lobed, the 5 included stamens inserted on its tube; style with 2 oblong stigmas. Stem: Smooth or hairy, 3 to 10 ft. long, twining or trailing over ground.

Leaves: Triangular or arrow-shaped, 2 to 5 in. long, on slender petioles.

Preferred Habitat - Wayside hedges, thickets, fields, walls.

Flowering Season - June-September.

Distribution - Nova Scotia to North Carolina, westward to Nebraska. Europe and Asia.

No one need be told that the pretty, bell-shaped pink and white flower on the vigorous vine clambering over stone walls and winding about the shrubbery of wayside thickets in a suffocating embrace is akin to the morning-glory of the garden trellis (C.

major). An exceedingly rapid climber, the twining stem often describes a complete circle in two hours, turning against the sun, or just contrary to the hands of a watch. Late in the season, when an abundance of seed has been set, the flower can well afford to keep open longer hours, also in rainy weather; but early in the summer, at least, it must attend to business only while the sun shines and its benefactors are flying. Usually it closes at sundown. On moonlight nights, however, the hospitable blossom keeps open for the benefit of certain moths. In Europe the plant's range is supposed to be limited to that of a crepuscular moth (Sphinx convolvuli), and where that benefactor is rare, as in England, the bindweed sets few seeds where it does not occur, as in Scotland, this convolvulus is seldom found wild; whereas in Italy Delpino tells of catching numbers of the moths in hedges overgrown with the common plant, by standing with thumb and forefinger over a flower, ready to close it when the insect has entered. We know that every floral clock is regulated by the hours of flight of its insect friends. When they have retired, the flowers close to protect nectar and pollen from useless pilferers. In this country various species of bees chiefly fertilize the bindweed blossoms. Guided by the white streaks, or pathfinders, they crawl into the deep tube and sip through one of the five narrow pa.s.sages leading to the nectary. A transverse section of the flower cut to show these five pa.s.sages standing in a circle around the central ovary looks like the end of a five-barreled revolver. Insects without a suitably long proboscis are, of course, excluded by this arrangement.

>From July until hard frost look for that exquisite little beetle, Ca.s.sida aurichalcea, like a drop of molten gold, clinging beneath the bindweed's leaves. The small perforations reveal his hiding places. "But you must be quick if you would capture him," says William Hamilton Gibson, "for he is off in a spangling streak of glitter. Nor is this golden sheen all the resource of the little insect; for in the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds, as you hold him in your hand, he has become a milky, iridescent opal, and now mother-of-pearl, and finally crawls before you in a coat of dull orange." A dead beetle loses all this wonderful l.u.s.ter. Even on the morning-glory in our gardens we may sometimes find these jeweled mites, or their fork-tailed, black larvae, or the tiny chrysalids suspended by their tails, although it is the wild bindweed that is ever their favorite abiding place.

The small FIELD BINDWEED (C. arvensis), a common immigrant from Europe, which has taken up its abode from Nova Scotia and Ontario southward to New Jersey, and westward to Kansas, trails over the ground with a deathless persistency which fills farmers with dismay. It is like a small edition of the hedge bind weed, only its calyx lacks the leaf-like bracts at its base, its slender stem rarely exceeds two feet in length, and the little pink and white flowers often grow in pairs. Their habit of closing both in the evening and in rainy weather indicates that they are adapted for diurnal insects only; but if the bell hang down, or if the corolla drop off, the pollen must fall on the stigma and effect self-fertilization. Many more insects visit this flower than the large bindweed, attracted by the peculiar fragrance, and led by the white streaks to the orange-colored under surface of the ovary, where the nectar lies concealed. Stigmas and anthers mature at the same time; but as the former are slightly the longer, they receive pollen brought from another flower before the visitor gets freshly dusted.