Wild Flowers Worth Knowing Part 33

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

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 sneezeweed, must take a whiff of snuff made of the dried and powdered leaves.

Yarrow; Milfoil; Old Man's Pepper; Nosebleed

_Achillea Millefolium_

_Flower-heads_--Grayish-white, rarely pinkish, in a hard, close, flat-topped, compound cl.u.s.ter. Ray florets 4 to 6, pistillate, fertile; disk florets yellow, afterward brown, perfect, fertile. _Stem:_ Erect, from horizontal root-stalk, 1 to 2 ft. high, leafy, sometimes hairy.

_Leaves:_ Very finely dissected (_Millefolium_ = thousand leaf), narrowly oblong in outline.

_Preferred Habitat_--Waste land, dry fields, banks, roadsides.

_Flowering Season_--June-November.

_Distribution_--Naturalized from Europe and Asia throughout North America.

Everywhere this commonest of common weeds confronts us; the compact, dusty-looking cl.u.s.ters appearing not by waysides only, around the world, but in the mythology, folk-lore, medicine, and literature of many peoples. Chiron, the centaur, who taught its virtues to Achilles that he might make an ointment to heal his Myrmidons wounded in the siege of Troy, named the plant for this favorite pupil, giving his own to the beautiful Blue Cornflower (_Centaurea Cya.n.u.s_). As a love-charm; as an herb-tea brewed by crones to cure divers ailments, from loss of hair to the ague; as an inducement to nosebleed for the relief of congestive headache; as an ingredient of an especially intoxicating beer made by the Swedes, it is mentioned in old books. Nowadays we are satisfied merely to admire the feathery ma.s.ses of lace-like foliage formed by young plants, to whiff the wholesome, nutty, autumnal odor of its flowers, or to wonder at the marvellous scheme it employs to overrun the earth.

Dog's or Foetid Camomile: Mayweed; Pig-sty Daisy; Dillweed; Dog-fennel

_Anthemis Cotula (Maruta Cotula)_

_Flower-heads_--Like smaller daisies, about 1 in. broad; 10 to 18 white, notched, neutral ray florets around a convex or conical yellow disk, whose florets are fertile, containing both stamens and pistil, their tubular corollas 5-cleft. _Stem:_ Smooth, much branched, 1 to 2 ft.

high, leafy, with unpleasant odor and acrid taste. _Leaves:_ Very finely dissected into slender segments.

_Preferred Habitat_--Roadsides, dry waste land, sandy fields.

_Flowering Season_--June-November.

_Distribution_--Throughout North America, except in circ.u.mpolar regions.

"Naturalized from Europe, and widely distributed as a weed in Asia, Africa, and Australasia" (Britton and Brown's "Flora"). Little wonder the camomile encompa.s.ses the earth, for it imitates the triumphant daisy, putting into practice those business methods of the modern department store, by which the composite horde have become the most successful strugglers for survival.

Dog, used as a prefix by several of the plant's folk-names, implies contempt for its worthlessness. It is quite another species, the Garden Camomile (_A. n.o.bilis_), which furnishes the apothecary with those flowers which, when steeped into a bitter, aromatic tea, have been supposed for generations to make a superior tonic and blood purifier.

Common Daisy; White-weed; White or Ox-eye Daisy; Marguerite; Love-me, Love-me-not

_Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum_

_Flower-heads_--Disk florets yellow, tubular, 4 or 5 toothed, containing stamens and pistil; surrounded by white ray florets, which are pistillate, fertile. _Stem:_ Smooth, rarely branched, 1 to 3 ft. high.

_Leaves:_ Mostly oblong in outline, coa.r.s.ely toothed and divided.

_Preferred Habitat_--Meadows, pastures, roadsides, waste land.

_Flowering Season_--May-November.

_Distribution_--Throughout the United States and Canada; not so common in the South and West.

Myriads and myriads of daisies, whitening our fields as if a belated blizzard had covered them with a snowy mantle in June, fill the farmer with dismay, the flower-lover with rapture. When vacation days have come; when chains and white-capped old women are to be made of daisies by happy children turned out of schoolrooms into meadows; when pretty maids, like Goethe's Marguerite, tell their fortunes by the daisy "petals"; when music bubbles up in a cascade of ecstasy from the throats of bobolinks nesting among the daisies, timothy, and clover; when the blue sky arches over the fairest scenes the year can show, and all the world is full of sunshine and happy promises of fruition, must we Americans always go to English literature for a song to fit our joyous mood?

"When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight--"

sang Shakespeare. His lovely suggestion of an English spring recalls no familiar picture to American minds. No more does Burns's.

"Wee, modest, crimson-tippit flower."

Shakespeare, Burns, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and all the British poets who have written familiar lines about the daisy, extolled a quite different flower from ours--_Bellis perennis_, the little pink and white blossom that hugs English turf as if it loved it--the true day's-eye, for it closes at nightfall and opens with the dawn.

Now, what is the secret of the large, white daisy's triumphal conquest of our territory? A naturalized immigrant from Europe and Asia, how could it so quickly take possession? In the over-cultivated Old World no weed can have half the chance for unrestricted colonizing that it has in our vast, unoccupied area. Most of our weeds are naturalized foreigners, not natives. Once released from the harder conditions of struggle at home (the seeds bring safely smuggled in among the ballast of freight ships, or hay used in packing), they find life here easy, pleasant; as if to make up for lost time, they increase a thousandfold.

If we look closely at a daisy--and a lens is necessary for any but the most superficial acquaintance--we shall see that, far from being a single flower, it is literally a host in itself. Each of the so-called white "petals" is a female floret, whose open corolla has grown large, white, and showy, to aid its sisters in advertising for insect visitors--a prominence gained only by the loss of its stamens. The yellow centre is composed of hundreds of minute tubular florets huddled together in a green cup as closely as they can be packed. Inside each of these tiny yellow tubes stand the stamens, literally putting their heads together. As the pistil within the ring of stamens develops and rises through their midst, two little hair brushes on its tip sweep the pollen from their anthers as a rounded brush would remove the soot from a lamp chimney. Now the pollen is elevated to a point where any insect crawling over the floret must remove it. The pollen gone, the pistil now spreads its two arms, that were kept tightly closed together while any danger of self-fertilization lasted. Their surfaces become sticky, that pollen brought from another flower may adhere to them. Notice that the pistils in the white ray florets have no hair brushes on their tips, because, no stamens being there, there is no pollen to be swept out. Because daisies are among the most conspicuous of flowers, and have facilitated dining for their visitors by offering them countless cups of refreshment that may be drained with a minimum loss of time, almost every insect on wings alights on them sooner or later. In short, they run their business on the principle of a cooperative department store. Immense quant.i.ties of the most vigorous, because cross-fertilized, seed being set in every patch, small wonder that our fields are white with daisies--a long and a merry life to them!

Tansy; Bitter-b.u.t.tons

_Tanacetum vulgare_

_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 medieval 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.

Common or Plumed Thistle

_Cirsium_

Is land fulfilling the primal curse because it brings forth thistles?

So thinks the farmer, no doubt, but not the goldfinches which daintily feed among the fluffy seeds, nor the bees, nor the "painted lady,"

which may be seen in all parts of the world where thistles grow, hovering about the beautiful rose-purple flowers. In the p.r.i.c.kly cradle of leaves, the caterpillar of this thistle b.u.t.terfly weaves a web around its main food store.

When the Danes invaded Scotland, they stole a silent night march upon the Scottish camp by marching barefoot; but a Dane inadvertently stepped on a thistle, and his sudden, sharp cry, arousing the sleeping Scots, saved them and their country; hence the Scotch emblem.

From July to November blooms the Common, Burr, Spear, Plume, Bank, Horse, Bull, Blue, b.u.t.ton, Bell, or Roadside Thistle (_C. lanceolatum_ or _Carduus lanceolatus_), a native of Europe and Asia, now a most thoroughly naturalized American from Newfoundland to Georgia, westward to Nebraska. Its violet flower-heads, about an inch and a half across, and as high as wide, are mostly solitary at the ends of formidable branches, up which few crawling creatures venture. But in the deep tube of each floret there is nectar secreted for the flying visitor who can properly transfer pollen from flower to flower. Such a one suffers no inconvenience from the p.r.i.c.kles, but, on the contrary, finds a larger feast saved for him because of them. Dense, matted, wool-like hairs, that cover the bristling stems of most thistles, make climbing mighty unpleasant for ants, which ever delight in pilfering sweets. Perhaps one has the temerity to start upward.

"Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,"

"If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all,"

might be the ant's pa.s.sionate outburst to the thistle, and the thistle's reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and p.r.i.c.kly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping scales of the deep green cup hold the luscious flowers. Now his feet becoming entangled in the cottony fibres wound about the scaly armor, and a bristling bodyguard thrusting spears at him in his struggles to escape, death happily releases him. All this tragedy to insure the thistle's cross-fertilized seed that, seated on the autumn winds, shall be blown far and wide in quest of happy conditions for the offspring!

Sometimes the Pasture or Fragrant Thistle (_C. pumilum_ or _Carduus odoratus_) still further protects its beautiful, odorous purple or whitish flower-head, that often measures three inches across, with a formidable array of p.r.i.c.kly small leaves just below it. In case a would-be pilferer breaks through these lines, however, there is a slight glutinous strip on the outside of the bracts that compose the cup wherein the nectar-filled florets are packed; and here, in sight of Mecca, he meets his death, just as a bird is caught on limed twigs. The Pasture Thistle, whose range is only from Maine to Delaware, blooms from July to September.