Wild Flowers Worth Knowing Part 32

At a glance one knows this flower to be akin to Robin's plantain, the asters and daisy. A smaller, more delicate species, with mostly entire leaves and appressed hairs (_E. ramosus_)--_E. strigosum_ of Gray--has a similar range and season of bloom. Both soon grow h.o.a.ry-headed after they have been fertilized by countless insects crawling over them (_Erigeron_ = early old). That either of these plants, or the pinkish, small-flowered, strong-scented Salt-marsh Fleabane (_Pluchea camphorata_), drive away fleas, is believed only by those who have not used them dried, reduced to powder, and sprinkled in kennels, from which, however, they have been known to drive away dogs.

Robin's, or Poor Robin's, or Robert's Plantain; Blue Spring Daisy; Daisy-leaved Fleabane

_Erigeron pulch.e.l.lus_

_Flower-heads_--Composite, daisy-like, 1 to 1-1/2 in. across; the outer circle of about 50 pale bluish-violet ray florets; the disk florets greenish yellow. _Stem:_ Simple, erect, hairy, juicy, flexible, from 10 in. to 2 ft. high, producing runners and offsets from base. _Leaves:_ Spatulate, in a flat tuft about the root; stem leaves narrow, more acute, seated, or partly clasping.

_Preferred Habitat_--Moist ground, hills, banks, gra.s.sy fields.

_Flowering Season_--April-June.

_Distribution_--United States and Canada, east of the Mississippi.

Like an aster blooming long before its season, Robin's Plantain wears a finely cut lavender fringe around a yellow disk of minute florets; but one of the first, not the last, in the long procession of composites has appeared when we see gay companies of these flowers nodding their heads above the gra.s.s in the spring breezes as if they were village gossips.

Pearly, or Large-flowered, Everlasting; Immortelle, Silver Leaf; Moons.h.i.+ne; Cottonweed; None-so-pretty

_Anaphalis margaritacea_

_Flower-heads_--Numerous pearly-white scales of the involucre holding tubular florets only; borne in broad, rather flat, compound corymbs at the summit. _Stem:_ Cottony, 1 to 3 ft. high, leafy to the top.

_Leaves:_ Upper ones small, narrow, linear; lower ones broader, lance-shaped, rolled backward, more or less woolly beneath.

_Preferred Habitat_--Dry fields, hillsides, open woods, uplands.

_Flowering Season_--July-September.

_Distribution_--North Carolina, Kansas, and California, far north.

When the small, white, overlapping scales of an everlasting's oblong involucre expand stiff and straight, each pert little flower-head resembles nothing so much as a miniature pond lily, only what would be a lily's yellow stamens are in this case the true flowers, which become brown in drying. It will be noticed that these tiny florets, so well protected in the centre, are of two different kinds, separated on distinct heads: the female florets with a tubular, five-cleft corolla, a two-cleft style, and a copious pappus of hairy bristles; the staminate, or male, florets more slender, the anthers tailed at the base.

Self-fertilization being, of course, impossible under such an arrangement, the florets are absolutely dependent upon little winged pollen carriers, whose sweet reward is well protected for them from pilfering ants by the cottony substance on the wiry stem, a device successfully employed by thistles also.

An imaginary blossom that never fades has been the dream of poets from Milton's day; but seeing one, who loves it? Our amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower--stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average farmhouse mantelpiece. Here it forms the most uncheering of winter bouquets, or a wreath about flowers made from the lifeless hair of some dear departed.

Elecampane; Horseheal; Yellow Starwort

_Inula Helenium_

_Flower-heads_--Large, yellow, solitary or a few, 2 to 4 in. across, on long, stout peduncles; the scaly green involucre nearly 1 in. high, holding disk florets surrounded by a fringe of long, very narrow, 3-toothed ray florets. _Stem:_ Usually unbranched, 2 to 6 ft. high, hairy above. _Leaves:_ Alternate, large, broadly oblong, pointed, saw-edged, rough above, woolly beneath; some with heart-shaped, clasping bases.

_Preferred Habitat_--Roadsides, fields, fence-rows, damp pastures.

_Flowering Season_--July-September.

_Distribution_--Nova Scotia to the Carolinas, and westward to Minnesota and Missouri.

The elecampane has not always led a vagabond existence. Once it had its pa.s.sage paid across the Atlantic, because special virtue was attributed to its thick, mucilaginous roots as a horse medicine. For more than two thousand years it has been employed by home doctors in Europe and Asia; and at first Old World immigrants thought they could not live here without the plant on their farms. Once given a chance to naturalize itself, no composite is slow in seizing it. The vigorous elecampane, rearing its fringy, yellow disks above lichen-covered stone walls in New England, the Virginia rail fence, and the rank weedy growth along barbed-wire barriers farther west, now bids fair to cross the continent.

Black-eyed Susan; Yellow or Ox-eye Daisy; n.i.g.g.e.r-head; Golden Jerusalem; Purple Cone-flower

_Rudbeckia hirta_

_Flower-heads_--From 10 to 20 orange-yellow neutral rays around a conical, dark purplish-brown disk of florets containing both stamens and pistil. _Stem:_ 1 to 3 ft. tall, hairy, rough, usually unbranched, often tufted. _Leaves:_ Oblong to lance-shaped, thick, sparingly notched, rough.

_Preferred Habitat_--Open sunny places; dry fields.

_Flowering Season_--May-September.

_Distribution_--Ontario and the Northwest Territory south to Colorado and the Gulf states.

So very many weeds having come to our Eastern sh.o.r.es from Europe, and marched farther and farther west year by year, it is but fair that black-eyed Susan, a native of Western clover fields, should travel toward the Atlantic in bundles of hay whenever she gets the chance, to repay Eastern farmers in their own coin. Do these gorgeous heads know that all our showy rudbeckias--some with orange red at the base of their ray florets--have become prime favorites of late years in European gardens, so offering them still another chance to overrun the Old World, to which so much American hay is s.h.i.+pped? Thrifty farmers may decry the importation into their mowing lots, but there is a glory to the cone-flower beside which the glitter of a gold coin fades into paltry nothingness. Having been instructed in the decorative usefulness of all this genus by European landscape gardeners, we Americans now importune the Department of Agriculture for seeds through members of Congress, even Representatives of States that have pa.s.sed stringent laws against the dissemination of "weeds." Inasmuch as each black-eyed Susan puts into daily operation the business methods of the white daisy, methods which have become a sort of creed for the entire composite horde to live by, it is plain that she may defy both farmers and legislators. Bees, wasps, flies b.u.t.terflies, and beetles could not be kept away from an entertainer so generous; for while the nectar in the deep, tubular brown florets may be drained only by long, slender tongues, pollen is accessible to all. Any one who has had a jar of these yellow daisies standing on a polished table indoors, and tried to keep its surface free from a ring of golden dust around the flowers, knows how abundant their pollen is. The black-eyed Susan, like the English sparrow, has come to stay--let farmers and law-makers do what they will.

Tall or Giant Sunflower

_Helianthus giganteus_

_Flower-heads_--Several, on long, rough-hairy peduncles; 1-1/2 to 2-1/4 in. broad; 10 to 20 pale yellow neutral rays around a yellowish disk whose florets are perfect, fertile. _Stem:_ 3 to 12 ft. tall, bristly-hairy, usually branching above, often reddish; from a perennial, fleshy root. _Leaves:_ Rough, firm, lance-shaped, saw-toothed, sessile.

_Preferred Habitat_--Low ground, wet meadows, swamps.

_Flowering Season_--August-October.

_Distribution_--Maine to Nebraska and the Northwest Territory, south to the Gulf of Mexico.

To how many sun-shaped golden disks with outflas.h.i.+ng rays might not the generic name of this clan (_helios_ = the sun, _anthos_ = a flower) be as fittingly applied: from midsummer till frost the earth seems given up to floral counterparts of his wors.h.i.+pful majesty. If, as we are told, one ninth of all flowering plants in the world belong to the composite order, of which more than sixteen hundred species are found in North America north of Mexico, surely more than half this number are made up after the daisy pattern, the most successful arrangement known, and the majority of these are wholly or partly yellow. Most conspicuous of the horde are the sunflowers, albeit they never reach in the wild state the gigantic dimensions and weight that cultivated, dark-brown centred varieties produced from the common sunflower have attained. For many years the origin of the latter flower, which suddenly shone forth in European gardens with unwonted splendor, was in doubt. Only lately it was learned that when Champlain and Segur visited the Indians on Lake Huron's eastern sh.o.r.es about three centuries ago, they saw them cultivating this plant, which must have been brought by them from its native prairies beyond the Mississippi--a plant whose stalks furnished them with a textile fibre, its leaves fodder, its flowers a yellow dye, and its seeds, most valuable of all, food and hair-oil! Early settlers in Canada were not slow in sending home to Europe so decorative and useful an acquisition. Swine, poultry, and parrots were fed on its rich seeds. Its flowers, even under Indian cultivation, had already reached abnormal size. Of the sixty varied and interesting species of wild sunflowers known to scientists, all are North American.

Moore's pretty statement,

"As the sunflower turns on her G.o.d when he sets The same look which she turn'd when he rose,"

lacks only truth to make it fact. The flower does not travel daily on its stalk from east to west. Often the top of the stem turns sharply toward the light to give the leaves better exposure, but the presence or absence of a terminal flower affects its action not at all.

Sneeze weed; Swamp Sunflower

_Helenium autumnale_

_Flower-heads_--Bright yellow, 1 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.