Wild Flowers Part 8

Distribution - British Possessions and United States from coast to coast, southward to Virginia, and Texas.

A curious, beautiful parasite, fastened on the roots of honest plants from which it draws its nourishment. The ancestors of this species, having deserted the path of rect.i.tude ages ago to live by piracy, gradually lost the use of their leaves, upon which virtuous plants depend as upon a part of their digestive apparatus; they grew smaller and smaller, shriveled and dried, until now that the one-flowered broom-rape sucks its food, rendered already digestible through another's a.s.similation, no leaves remain on its brownish scapes. Disuse of any talent in the vegetable kingdom, as in the spiritual, leads to inevitable loss: "Unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away."

HAIRY RUELLIA (Ruellia ciliosa) Acanthus family

Flowers - Pale violet blue, showy, about 2 in. long, solitary or cl.u.s.tered in the axils or at the end of stem. Calyx of 5 bristle-shaped hairy segments; corolla with very slender tube expanding above in 5 nearly equal obtuse lobes; stamens 4; pistil with recurved style. Stem: Hairy, especially above, erect, 1 to 2 1/2 ft. high. Leaves: Opposite, oblong, narrowed at apex, entire, covered with soft white hairs.

Preferred Habitat - Dry soil.

Flowering Season - June-September.

Distribution - New Jersey southward to the Gulf and westward to Michigan and Nebraska.

Many charming ruellias from the tropics adorn hothouses and window gardens in winter; but so far north as the New Jersey pine barrens, and westward where killing frosts occur, this perennial proves to be perfectly hardy. In addition to its showy blossoms, which so successfully invite insects to transfer their pollen, thereby counteracting the bad effects of close inbreeding, the plant bears inconspicuous cleistogamous or blind ones also. These look like arrested buds that never open; but, being fertilized with their own pollen, ripen abundant seed nevertheless.

One frequently finds holes bitten in these flowers, as in so many others long of tube or spur. b.u.mblebees, among the most intelligent and mischievous of insects, are apt to be the chief offenders; but wasps are guilty too, and the female carpenter bee, which ordinarily slits holes to extract nectar, has been detected in the act of removing circular pieces of the corolla from this ruellia with which to plug up a thimble-shaped tube in some decayed tree. Here she deposits an egg on top of a layer of baby food, consisting of a paste of pollen and nectar, and seals up the nursery with another bit of leaf or flower, repeating the process until the long tunnel is filled with eggs and food for larvae. Then she dies, leaving her entire race apparently extinct, and living only in embryo for months. This is the bee which commonly cuts her round plugs from rose leaves.

The SMOOTH RUELLIA (R. strepens), an earlier bloomer than the preceding, and with a more southerly range, has a shorter, thicker tube to its handsome blue flower, and lacks the hairs which guard its relative from crawling pilferers.

BLUETS; INNOCENCE; HOUSTONIA; QUAKER LADIES; QUAKER BONNETS; VENUS' PRIDE (Houstonia caerulea) Madder family

Flowers - Very small, light to purplish blue or white, with yellow center, and borne at end of each erect slender stem that rises from 3 to 7 in. high. Corolla funnel-shaped, with 4 oval, pointed, spreading lobes that equal the slender tube in length; rarely the corolla has more divisions; 4 stamens inserted on tube of corolla; 2 stigmas; calyx 4-lobed. Leaves: Opposite, seated on stem, oblong, tiny; the lower ones spatulate. Fruit: A 2-lobed pod, broader than long, its upper half free from calyx; seeds deeply concave. Root stock: Slender, spreading, forming dense tufts.

Preferred Habitat - Moist meadows, wet rocks and banks.

Flowering Season - April-July, or spa.r.s.ely through summer.

Distribution - Eastern Canada and United States west to Michigan, south to Georgia and Alabama.

Millions of these dainty wee flowers, scattered through the gra.s.s of moist meadows and by the wayside, reflect the blue and the serenity of heaven in their pure, upturned faces. Where the white variety grows, one might think a light snowfall had powdered the gra.s.s, or a milky way of tiny floral stars had streaked a terrestrial path. Linnaeus named the flower for Dr. Houston, a young English physician, botanist, and collector, who died in South America in 1733, after an exhausting tramp about the Gulf of Mexico.

To secure cross-fertilization, the object toward which so much marvelous floral organism is directed, this little plant puts forth two forms of blossoms - one with the stamens in the lower portion of the corolla tube, and the stigmas exserted; the other form with the stigmas below, and the stamens elevated to the mouth of the corolla. But the two kinds do not grow in the same patch, seed from either producing after its kind. Many insects visit these blossoms, but chiefly small bees and b.u.t.terflies.

Conspicuous among the latter is the common little meadow fritillary (Brenthis bellona), whose tawny, dark-speckled wings expand and close in apparent ecstasy as he tastes the tiny drop of nectar in each dainty enameled cup. Coming to feast with his tongue dusted from anthers nearest the nectary, he pollenizes the large stigmas of a short-styled blossom without touching its tall anthers. But it is evident that he could not be depended on to fertilize the long-styled form, with its smaller stigma, because of this ability to insert his slender tongue from the side where it avoids contact. Flies and beetles enter the blossoms, but small bees are best adapted as all-round benefactors. This simple-looking blossom, that measures barely half an inch across, is clever enough to multiply its lovely species a thousand fold, while many a larger, and therefore one might suppose a wiser, flower dwindles toward extinction.

John Burroughs found a single bluet in blossom one January, near Was.h.i.+ngton, when the clump of earth on which it grew was frozen solid. A pot of roots gathered in autumn and placed in a sunny window has sent up a little colony of star-like flowers throughout a winter.

WILD, COMMON, or CARD TEASEL; GYPSY COMBS (Dipsacus sylvestris) Teasel family

Flowers - Purple or lilac, small, packed in dense, cylindric heads, 3 to 4 in. long; growing singly on ends of footstalks, the flowers set among stiffly pointed, slender scales. Calyx cup-shaped, 4-toothed. Corolla 4-lobed; stamens 4; leaves of involucre, slender, bristled, curved upward as high as flower-head or beyond. Stems: 3 to 6 ft. high, stout, branched, leafy, with numerous short p.r.i.c.kles. Leaves: Opposite, lance-shaped, seated on stem, with bristles along the stout midrib.

Preferred Habitat - Roadsides and waste places.

Flowering Season - July-September.

Distribution - Maine to Virginia, westward to Ontario and the Mississippi. Europe and Asia.

Manufacturers find that no invention can equal the natural teasel head for raising a nap on woolen cloth, because it breaks at any serious obstruction, whereas a metal subst.i.tute, in such a case, tears the material. Accordingly, the plant is largely cultivated in the west of England, and quant.i.ties that have been imported from France and Germany may be seen in wagons on the way to the factories in any of the woolen-trade towns. After the flower-heads wither, the stems are cut about eight inches long, stripped of p.r.i.c.kles, to provide a handle, and after drying, the natural tool is ready for use.

Bristling with armor, the teasel is not often attacked by browsing cattle. Occasionally even the upper leaf surfaces are dotted over with p.r.i.c.kles enough to tear a tender tongue. This is a curious feature, for p.r.i.c.kles usually grow out of veins. In the receptacle formed where the bases of the upper leaves grow together, rain and dew are found collected - a certain cure for warts, country people say. Venus' Cup, Bath, or Basin, and Water Thistle, are a few of the teasel's folk names earned by its curious little tank. In it many small insects are drowned, and these are supposed to contribute nourishment to the plant; for Mr. Francis Darwin has noted that protoplasmic filaments reach out into the liquid.

Owing to the stiff spines which radiate from the flower cl.u.s.ter, the b.u.mblebees, which princ.i.p.ally fertilize it, can reach the florets only with their heads, and not pollenize them by merely crawling over them as in the true compositae. But by first maturing its anthers, then when they have shed their pollen, elevating its stigmas, the teasel prevents self-fertilization.

HAREBELL or HAIRBELL; BLUE BELLS of SCOTLAND; LADY'S THIMBLE (Campanula rotundifolia) Bellflower family

Flowers - Bright blue or violet blue, bell-shaped, 1/2 in. long or over, drooping from hair-like stalks. Calyx of 5-pointed, narrow, spreading lobes; slender stamens alternate with lobes of corolla, and borne on summit of calyx tube, which is adherent to ovary; pistil with 3 stigmas in maturity only. Stem: Very slender, 6 in. to 3 ft. high, often several from same root; simple or branching. Leaves: Lower ones nearly round, usually withered and gone by flowering season; stem leaves narrow, pointed, seated on stem. Fruit: An egg-shaped, pendent, 3-celled capsule with short openings near base; seeds very numerous, tiny.

Preferred Habitat - Moist rocks, uplands.

Flowering Season - June-September.

Distribution - Arctic regions of Europe, Asia, and America; southward on this continent, through Canada to New Jersey and Pennsylvania; westward to Nebraska, to Arizona in the Rockies, and to California in the Sierra Nevadas.

The inaccessible crevice of a precipice, moist rocks sprayed with the das.h.i.+ng waters of a lake or some tumbling mountain stream, wind-swept upland meadows, and shady places by the roadside may hold bright bunches of these hardy bells, swaying with exquisite grace on tremulous, hair-like stems that are fitted to withstand the fiercest mountain blasts, however frail they appear. How dainty, slender, tempting these little flowers are! One gladly risks a watery grave or broken bones to bring down a bunch from its aerial cranny.

It was a long stride forward in the evolutionary scale when the harebell welded its five once separate petals together; first at the base, then farther and farther up the sides, until a solid bell-shaped structure resulted. This arrangement which makes insect fertilization a more certain process because none of the pollen is lost through apertures, and because the visitor must enter the flower only at the vital point where the stigmas come in contact with his pollen-laden body, has given to all the flowers that have attained to it, marked ascendency.

Like most inverted blossoms, the harebell hangs its head to protect its nectar and pollen, not only from rain, but from the intrusion of undesirable crawling insects which would simply brush off its pollen in the gra.s.s before reaching the pistil of another flower, and so defeat cross-fertilization, the end and aim of so many blossoms. Advertising for winged insects by its bright color, the harebell attracts bees, b.u.t.terflies, and many others. These visitors cannot well walk on the upright petals, and sooner or later must clasp the pistil if they would secure the nectar secreted at the base. In doing so, they will dust themselves and the immature pistil with the pollen from the surrounding anthers; but a newly opened flower is incapable of fertilization. The pollen, although partially discharged in the unopened bud, is prevented from falling out by a coat of hairs on the upper part of the style. By the time all the pollen has been removed by visitors, however, and the stamens which matured early have withered, the pistil has grown longer, until it looks like the clapper in a bell; the stigma at its top has separated into three horizontal lobes which, being sticky on the under side, a pollen-laden insect on entering the bell must certainly brush against them and render them fertile. But b.u.mblebees, its chief benefactors, and others may not have done their duty by the flower; what then? Why, the stigmas in that case finally bend backward to reach the left over pollen, and fertilize themselves, obviously the next best thing for them to do. How one's reverence increases when one begins to understand, be it ever so little of, the divine plan!

"Probably the most striking blue and purple wild flowers we have," says John Burroughs, "are of European origin. These colors, except with the fall asters and gentians, seem rather unstable in our flora." This theory is certainly borne out in the case of the RAMPION, EUROPEAN, or CREEPING BELLFLOWER (C.

rapunculoides), now detected in the act of escaping from gardens from New Brunswick to Ontario, Southern New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and making itself very much at home in our fields and along the waysides. Compared with the delicate little harebell, it is a plant of rank, rigid habit. Its erect, rather stout stem, set with elongated oval, hairy, alternate leaves, and crowned with a one-sided raceme of widely expanded, purple-blue bells rising about two feet above the ground, has little of the exquisite grace of its cousin. It blooms from July to September.

This is the species whose roots are eaten by the omnivorous European peasant.

One of the few native campanulas, the TALL BELLFLOWER (C.

Americana), waves long, slender wands studded with blue or sometimes whitish flowers high above the ground of moist thickets and woods throughout the eastern half of this country, but rarely near the sea. Doubtless the salt air, which intensifies the color of so many flowers, would brighten its rather slatey blue. The corolla, which is flat, round, about an inch across, and deeply cleft into five pointed petals, has the effect of a miniature pinwheel in motion. Mature flowers have the style elongated, bent downward, then curved upward, that the stigmas may certainly be in the way of the visiting insect pollen-laden from an earlier bloomer, and be cross-fertilized. The larger bees, its benefactors, which visit it for nectar, touch only the upper side of the style, on which they must alight; but the anthers waste pollen by shedding it on all sides. No insect can take shelter from rain or pa.s.s the night in this flower, as he frequently does in its more hospitable relative, the harebell. English gardeners, more appreciative than our own of our native flora, frequently utilize this charming plant in their rockwork, increasing their stock by a division of the dense, leafy rosettes.

VENUS' LOOKING-GLa.s.s; CLASPING BELLFLOWER (Legouzia perfoliata; Specularia perfoliata of Gray) Bellflower family

Flowers - Violet blue, from 1/2 to 3/4 in. across; solitary or 2 or 3 together, seated, in axils of upper leaves. Calyx lobes varying from 3 to 5 in earlier and later flowers, acute, rigid; corolla a 5-spoked wheel; 5 stamens; pistil with 3 stigmas. Stem: 6 in. to 2 ft. long, hairy, densely leafy, slender, weak. Leaves: Round, clasped about stem by heart-shaped base.

Preferred Habitat - Sterile waste places, dry woods.

Flowering Season - May-September.

Distribution - From British Columbia, Oregon, and Mexico, east to Atlantic Ocean.

At the top of a gradually lengthened and apparently overburdened leafy stalk, weakly leaning upon surrounding vegetation, a few perfect blossoms spread their violet wheels, while below them insignificant earlier flowers, which, although they have never opened, nor reared their heads above the hollows of the little sh.e.l.l-like leaves where they lie secluded, have, nevertheless, been producing seed without imported pollen while their showy sisters slept. But the later blooms, by attracting insects, set cross-fertilized seed to counteract any evil tendencies that might weaken the species if it depended upon self-fertilization only. When the European Venus' looking-gla.s.s used to be cultivated in gardens here, our grandmothers tell us it was altogether too prolific, crowding out of existence its less fruitful, but more lovely, neighbors.

The SMALL VENUS' LOOKING-GLa.s.s (L. biflora), of similar habit to the preceding, but with egg-shaped or oblong leaves seated on, not clasping, its smooth and very slender stem, grows in the South and westward to California.

GREAT LOBELIA; BLUE CARDINAL-FLOWER (Lobelia syphilitica) Bellflower family

Flowers - Bright blue, touched with white, fading to pale blue, about 1 in. long, borne on tall, erect, leafy spike. Calyx 5-parted, the lobes sharply cut, hairy. Corolla tubular, open to base on one side, 2-lipped, irregularly 5-lobed, the petals p.r.o.nounced at maturity only. Stamens 5, united by their hairy anthers into a tube around the style; larger anthers smooth.

Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, stout, simple, leafy, slightly hairy.

Leaves: Alternate, oblong, tapering, pointed, irregularly toothed, 2 to 6 in. long, 1/2 to 2 in. wide.

Preferred Habitat - Moist or wet soil; beside streams.

Flowering Season - July-October Distribution - Ontario and northern United States west to Dakota, south to Kansas and Georgia.

To the evolutionist, ever on the lookout for connecting links, the lobelias form an interesting group, because their corolla, slit down the upper side and somewhat flattened, shows the beginning of the tendency toward the strap or ray flowers that are nearly confined to the composites of much later development, of course, than tubular single blossoms. Next to ma.s.sing their flowers in showy heads, as the composites do, the lobelias have the almost equally advantageous plan of crowding theirs along a stem so as to make a conspicuous advertis.e.m.e.nt to attract the pa.s.sing bee and to offer him the special inducement of numerous feeding places close together.

The handsome GREAT LOBELIA, constantly and invidiously compared with its gorgeous sister the cardinal flower, suffers unfairly.

When asked what his favorite color was, Eugene Field replied: "Why, I like any color at all so long as it's red!" Most men, at least, agree with him, and certainly hummingbirds do; our scarcity of red flowers being due, we must believe, to the scarcity of hummingbirds, which chiefly fertilize them. But how bees love the blue blossoms!

There are many cases where the pistil of a flower necessarily comes in contact with its own pollen, yet fertilization does not take place, however improbable this may appear. Most orchids, for example, are not susceptible to their own pollen. It would seem as if our lobelia, in elevating its stigma through the ring formed by the united anthers, must come in contact with some of the pollen they have previously discharged from their tips, not only on the b.u.mblebee that shakes it out of them when he jars the flower, but also within the tube. But when the anthers are mature, the two lobes of the still immature stigma are pressed together, and cannot be fertilized. Nevertheless, the hairy tips of some of the anthers brush off the pollen grains that may have lodged on the stigma as it pa.s.ses through the ring in its ascent, thus making surety doubly sure. Only after the stigma projects beyond the ring of anthers does it expand its lobes, which are now ready to receive pollen brought from another later flower by the incoming b.u.mblebee to which it is adapted.

Linnaeus named this group of plants for Matthias de l'Obel, a Flemish botanist, or herbalist more likely, who became physician to James I. of England.

Preferably in dry, sandy soil or in meadows, and over a wide range, the slender, straight shoots of PALE SPIKED LOBELIA (L.

spicata) bloom early and throughout the summer months, the inflorescence itself sometimes reaching a height of two feet. At the base of the plant there is usually a tuft of broadly oblong leaves; those higher up narrow first into spoon-shaped, then into pointed, bracts, along the thick and gradually lengthened spike of scattered bloom. The flowers are oft en pale enough to be called white. Like their relatives, they first ripen their anthers to prevent self-fertilization.