Wild Flowers Part 45

The charmingly delicate, wiry GARDEN TICKSEED, known in seedsmen's catalogues as CALLIOPSIS (Coreopsis tinctoria), which has also locally escaped to roadsides and waste places eastward, is at home in moist, rich soil from Louisiana, Arizona, and Nebraska northward into Minnesota and the British Possessions.

>From May to September its fine, slender, low-growing stems are crowned with small yellow composite flowers whose rays are velvety maroon or brown at the base. (Coreopsis = like a bug, from the shape of the seeds.)

LARGER or SMOOTH BUR-MARIGOLD; BROOK SUNFLOWER (Bidens laevis; B. chrysanthemoides of Gray) Thistle family

Flower-heads - Showy golden yellow, 1 to 2 1/2 in. across, numerous, on short peduncles; 8 to 10 neutral rays around a dingy yellowish or brown disk of tubular, perfect, fertile florets.

Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high. Leaves: Opposite, sessile, lance-shaped, regularly saw-toothed.

Preferred Habitat - Wet ground, swamps, ditches, meadows.

Flowering Season - August-November.

Distribution - Quebec and Minnesota, southward to the Gulf States and Lower California.

Next of kin to the golden coreopsis, it behooves some of the bur-marigolds to redeem their clan's reputation for ugliness and certainly the brook sunflower is a not unworthy relative. How gay the ditches and low meadows are with its bright, generous bloom in late summer, and until even the goldenrod wands turn brown!

Yet all this show is expended merely for advertising purposes.

The golden ray florets, sacrificing their fertility to the general welfare of the cooperative community, which each flower-head is in reality, have grown conspicuous to attract bees and wasps, b.u.t.terflies, flies, and some beetles to the dingy ma.s.s of tubular florets in the center, in which nectar is concealed, while pollen is exposed for the visitors to transfer as they crawl. The rays simply make a show; within the minute, insignificant looking tubes is transacted the important business of life.

Later in the season, when the bur-marigolds are transformed into armories bristling with rusty, two-p.r.o.nged, and finely-barbed pitchforks (Bidens = two teeth), our real quarrel with the tribe begins. The innocent pa.s.serby - man, woman, or child, woolly sheep, cattle with switching tails, hairy dogs or foxes, indeed, any creature within reach of the vicious grappling-hooks - must transport them on his clothing; for it is thus that these tramps have planned to get away from the parent plant in the hope of being picked off, and the seeds dropped in fresh colonizing ground; travelling in the disreputable company of their kinsmen the beggar-ticks and Spanish needles, the burdock burs, cleavers, agrimony, and tick-trefoils.

BEGGAR-TICKS, STICK-TIGHT, RAYLESS MARIGOLD, BEGGAR-LICE, PITCHFORKS, or STICK-SEED (B. frondosa) sufficiently explains its justly defamed character in its popular names. Numerous dull, dark, tawny orange flower-heads without, rays, or with insignificant ones scarcely to be detected, and surrounded by taller leaf-like bracts, add little to the beauty of the moist fields and roadsides where they rear themselves on long peduncles from July to October. The smooth, erect, branched, and often reddish, stem may be anywhere from two to nine feet tall. Usually the upper leaves are not divided, but the lower ones are pinnately compounded of three to five divisions, the segments lance-shaped or broader, and sharply toothed. As in all the bur-marigolds, we find each floret's calyx converted into a barbed implement - javelin, pitchfork, or halberd - for grappling the clothing of the first innocent victim unwittingly acting as a colonizing agent.

SNEEZEWEED; SWAMP SUNFLOWER (Helenium autumnale) Thistle family

Flower-heads - Bright yellow, to 2 in. across, numerous, borne on long peduncles in corymb-like cl.u.s.ters; the rays 3 to 5 cleft, and drooping around the yellow or yellowish-brown disk. Stem: 2 to 6 ft. tall, branched above. Leaves: Alternate, firm, lance-shaped to oblong, toothed, seated on stem or the bases slightly decurrent; bitter.

Preferred Habitat - Swamps, wet ground, banks of streams.

Flowering Season - August-October.

Distribution - Quebec to the Northwest Territory; southward to Florida and Arizona.

September, which also brings out lively ma.s.ses of the swamp sunflower in the low-lying meadows, was appropriately called our golden month by an English traveler who saw for the first time the wonderful yellows in our autumn foliage, the surging seas of goldenrod; the tall, showy sunflowers, ox-eyes, rudbeckias, marigolds, and all the other glorious composites in Nature's garden, as in men's, which copy the sun's resplendent disk and rays to brighten with one final dazzling outburst the somber face of the dying year.

To the swamp sunflowers honey-bees hasten for both nectar and pollen, velvety b.u.mblebees suck the sweets, leaf-cutter and mason bees, wasps, some b.u.t.terflies, flies, and beetles visit them daily, for the round disks mature their perfect fertile florets in succession. Since the drooping ray flowers, which are pistillate only, are fertile too, there is no scarcity of seed set, much to the farmer's dismay. Most cows know enough to respect the bitter leaves' desire to be let alone; but many a pail of milk has been spoiled by a mouthful of Helenium among the herbage. Whoever cares to learn from experience why this was called the sneezeweed, must take a whiff of snuff made of the dried and powdered leaves.

The PURPLE-HEAD SNEEZEWEED (H. nudiflorum), its yellow rays sometimes wanting, occurs in the South and West.

TANSY; BITTER-b.u.t.tONS (Tanacetum vulgare) Thistle family

Flower-heads - Small, round, of tubular florets only, packed within a depressed involucre, and borne, in flat-topped corymbs.

Stem: 1 1/2 to 3 ft. tall, leafy. Leaves: Deeply and pinnately cleft into narrow, toothed divisions; strong scented.

Preferred Habitat - Roadsides; commonly escaped from gardens.

Flowering Season - July-September.

Distribution - Nova Scotia, westward to Minnesota, south to Missouri and North Carolina. Naturalized from Europe.

"In the spring time, are made with the leaves hereof newly sprung up, and with eggs, cakes or Tansies which be pleasant in taste and goode for the Stomache," wrote quaint old Gerarde. That these were popular dainties in the seventeenth century we further know through Pepys, who made a "pretty dinner" for some guests, to wit: "A brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tansy, and two neat's tongues, and cheese, the second." Cole's "Art of Simpling,"

published in 1656, a.s.sures maidens that tansy leaves laid to soak in b.u.t.termilk for nine days "maketh the complexion very fair."

Tansy tea, in short, cured every ill that flesh is heir to, according to the simple faith of mediaeval herbalists - a faith surviving in some old women even to this day. The name is said to be a corruption of athanasia, derived from two Greek words meaning immortality. When some monks in reading Lucian came across the pa.s.sage where Jove, speaking of Ganymede to Mercury, says, "Take him hence, and when he has tasted immortality let him return to us," their literal minds inferred that this plant must have been what Ganymede tasted, hence they named it athanasia! So great credence having been given to its medicinal powers in Europe, it is not strange the colonists felt they could not live in the New World without tansy. Strong-scented pungent tufts topped with bright yellow b.u.t.tons - runaways from old gardens - are a conspicuous feature along many a roadside leading to colonial homesteads.

GOLDEN RAGWORT; GROUNDSEL; SQUAW-WEED (Senecio aureus) Thistle family

Flower-heads - Golden yellow, about 3/4 in. across, borne on slender peduncles in a loose, leafless cl.u.s.ter; rays 8 to 12 around minute disk florets. Stem: Slender, 1 to 2 1/2 ft. high, solitary or tufted, from a strong-scented root. Leaves: From the root, on long petioles, rounded or heart-shaped, scalloped-edged, often purplish; stem leaves variable, lance-shaped or lyrate, deeply cut, sessile.

Preferred Habitat - Swamps, wet ground, meadows.

Flowering Season - May-July.

Distribution - Gulf States northward to Missouri, Ontario, and Newfoundland.

While the aster clan is the largest we have in North America, this genus Senecio is really the most numerous branch of the great composite tribe, numbering as it does nearly a thousand species, represented in all quarters of the earth. It is said to take its name from senex = an old man, in reference to the white hairs on many species; or, more likely, to the silky pappus that soon makes the fertile disks h.o.a.ry headed. "I see the downy heads of the senecio gone to seed, thistle like but small," wrote Th.o.r.eau in his journal under date of July 2nd, when only the p.u.s.s.y-toes everlasting could have plumed its seeds for flight over the dry uplands in a similar fashion. Innumerable as the yellow, daisy-like composites are, most of them appear in late summer or autumn, and so the novice should have little difficulty in naming these loosely cl.u.s.tered, bright, early blooming small heads.

RED AND INDEFINITES

"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 cla.s.sifications, works of Linnaeus, and our own cla.s.sic 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, cl.u.s.tered on the lower part of a smooth, club-shaped, slender spadix within a green and maroon or whitish-striped spathe that curves in a broad-pointed 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 cla.s.ses pounce upon it as they would upon a pious young clergyman," complains Mr.

Ellw.a.n.ger. 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, toadstools, 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 pa.s.sage 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, sh.e.l.l-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, broadly 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 p.u.s.s.y 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 sh.o.r.es.