Part 8

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 substitute, in such a case, tears the material. Accordingly, the plant is largely cultivated in the west of England, and quantities 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 prickles, 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 prickles enough to tear a tender tongue. This is a curious feature, for prickles 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 cluster, the bumblebees, which principally 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 dashing 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 grass 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, butterflies, 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 bumblebees, 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 pass 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-GLASS; 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 shell-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-glass 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-GLASS (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 pronounced 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 massing 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 advertisement to attract the passing 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 bumblebee 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 passes 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 bumblebee 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.

The lithe, graceful little BROOK LOBELIA (L. Kalmii), whose light-blue flowers, at the end of thread-like footstems, form a loose raceme, sways with a company of its fellows among the grass on wet banks, beside meadow runnels and brooks, particularly in limestone soil, from Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territory and southward to New Jersey. It bears an insignificant capsule, not inflated like the Indian tobacco's; and long, narrow, spoon-shaped leaves. Twenty inches is the greatest height this little plant may hope to attain.

Not only beside water, and in it, but often totally immersed, grows the WATER LOBELIA or GLADIOLE (L. Dortmanna). The slender, hollow, smooth stem rises from a submerged tuft of round, hollow, fleshy leaves longitudinally divided by a partition, and bears at the top a scattered array of pale-blue flowers from August to September.

INDIAN or WILD TOBACCO; GAG-ROOT; ASTHMA-WEED; BLADDER-POD LOBELIA (Lobelia inflata) Bellflower family

Flowers - Pale blue or violet, small, borne at short intervals in spike-like leafy racemes. Calyx 5-parted, its awl-shaped lobes 1/4 in. long, or as long as the tubular, 2-lipped, 5-cleft, corolla that opens to base of tube on upper side. Stamens, 5 united by their hairy anthers into a ring around the 2-lobed style. Stem: From 1 to 3 feet high, hairy, very acrid, much branched, leafy. Leaves: Alternate, oblong or ovate, toothed, the upper ones acute, seated on stem; lower ones obtuse, petioled, to 2 1/2 in. long. Fruit: A much inflated, rounded, ribbed, many seeded capsule. Preferred Habitat - Dry fields and thickets; poor soil. Flowering Season - July-November. Distribution - Labrador westward to the Missouri River, south to Arkansas and Georgia.

The most stupid of the lower animals knows enough to let this poisonous, acrid plant alone; but not so man, who formerly made a quack medicine from it in the days when a drug that set one's internal organism on fire was supposed to be especially beneficial. One taste of the plant gives a realizing sense of its value as an emetic. How the red man enjoyed smoking and chewing the bitter leaves, except for the drowsiness that followed, is a mystery.

On account of the smallness of its flowers and their scantiness, the Indian tobacco is perhaps the least attractive of the lobelias, none of which has so inflated a seed vessel, the distinguishing characteristic of this common plant.

CHICORY; SUCCORY; BLUE SAILORS; BUNK (Cichorium Intybus) Chicory family

Flower-head - Bright, deep azure to gray blue, rarely pinkish or white, 1 to 1 1/2 in. broad, set close to stem, often in small clusters for nearly the entire length; each head a composite of ray flowers only, 5-toothed at upper edge, and set in a flat green receptacle. Stem: Rigid, branching, to 3 ft. high. Leaves: Lower ones spreading on ground, 3 to 6 in. long, spatulate, with deeply cut or irregular edges, narrowed into petioles, from a deep tap-root; upper leaves of stem and branches minute, bract-like. Preferred Habitat - Roadsides, waste places, fields. Flowering Season - July-October. Distribuition - Common in Eastern United States and Canada, south to the Carolinas; also sparingly westward to Nebraska.

At least the dried and ground root of this European invader is known to hosts of people who buy it undisguised or not, according as they count it an improvement to their coffee or a disagreeable adulterant. So great is the demand for chicory that, notwithstanding its cheapness, it is often in its turn adulterated with roasted wheat, rye, acorns, and carrots. Forced and blanched in a warm, dark place, the bitter leaves find a ready market as a salad known as "barbe de Capucin" by the fanciful French. Endive and dandelion, the chicory's relatives, appear on the table too, in spring, where people have learned the possibilities of salads, as they certainly have in Europe.

>From the depth to which the tap-root penetrates, it is not unlikely the succory derived its name from the Latin succurrere = to run under. The Arabic name chicourey testifies to the almost universal influence of Arabian physicians and writers in Europe after the Conquest. As chicoree, achicoria, chicoria, cicorea, chicorie, cichorei, cikorie, tsikorei, and cicorie the plant is known respectively to the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Russians, and Danes.

On cloudy days or in the morning only throughout midsummer the "peasant posy" opens its "dear blue eyes"

"Where tired feet Toil to and fro; Where flaunting Sin May see thy heavenly hue, Or weary Sorrow look from thee Toward a tenderer blue!" - Margaret Deland.

In his "Humble Bee" Emerson, too, sees only beauty in the "Succory to match the sky;" but, mirabile dictu, Vergil, rarely caught in a prosaic, practical mood, wrote, "And spreading succ'ry chokes the rising field."

IRON-WEED; FLAT TOP (Vernonia Noveboracensis) Thistle family.

Flower-head - Composite of tubular florets only, intense reddish-purple thistle-like heads, borne on short, branched peduncles and forming broad, flat clusters; bracts of involucre, brownish purple, tipped with awl-shaped bristles. Stem: 3 to 9 ft. high, rough or hairy, branched. Leaves: Alternate, narrowly oblong or lanceolate, saw-edged, 3 to 10 in. long, rough. Preferred Habitat - Moist soil, meadows, fields. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - Massachusetts to Georgia, and westward to the Mississippi.

Emerson says a weed is a plant whose virtues we have not yet discovered; but surely it is no small virtue in the iron-weed to brighten the roadsides and low meadows throughout the summer with bright clusters of bloom. When it is on the wane, the asters, for which it is sometimes mistaken, begin to appear, but an instant's comparison shows the difference between the two flowers. After noting the yellow disk in the center of an aster, it is not likely the iron-weed's thistle-like head of ray florets only will ever again be confused with it. Another rank-growing neighbor with which it has been confounded by the novice is the Joe Pye weed, a far paler, pinkish flower.

To each tiny floret, secreting nectar in its tube, many insects, attracted by the bright color of the iron-weed standing high above surrounding vegetation, come to feast. Long-lipped bees and flies rest awhile for refreshment, but butterflies of many beautiful kinds are by far the most abundant visitors. Pollen carried out by the long, hairy styles as they extend to maturity must attach itself to their tongues. The tiger swallow-tail butterfly appears to have a special preference for this flower. (See Self-Heal.)

COMMON or SCALY BLAZING STAR; COLIC-ROOT; RATTLESNAKE MASTER; BUTTON SNAKEROOT (Lacinaria squarrosa; Liatris squarrosa of Gray) Thistle family

Flower-heads - Composite, about 1 in. long, bright purple or rose purple, of tubular florets only, from an involucre of overlapping, rigid, pointed bracts; each of the few flower-heads from the leaf axils along a slender stem in a wand-like raceme. Stem: 1/2 to 2 ft. high. Leaves: Alternate, narrow, entire. Preferred habitat - Dry, rich soil. Flowering Season - June-September. Distribution - Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico, westward to Nebraska.

Beginning at the top, the apparently fringed flower-heads open downward along the wand, whose length depends upon the richness of the soil. All of the flowers are perfect and attract long-tongued bees and flies (especially Exoprosopa fasciata) and butterflies, which, as they sip from the corolla tube, receive the pollen carried out and exposed on the long divisions of the style. Some people have pretended to cure rattlesnake bites with applications of the globular tuber of this and the next species.

The LARGE BUTTON SNAKEROOT, BLUE BLAZING STAR, or GAY FEATHER (L. scariosa), may attain six feet, but usually not more than half that height; and its round flower-heads normally stand well away from the stout stem on foot-stems of their own. The bristling scales of the involucre, often tinged with purple at the tips, are a conspicuous feature. With much the same range and choice of habitat as the last species, this Blazing Star is a later bloomer, coming into flower in August, and helping the goldenrods and asters brighten the landscape throughout the early autumn. The name of gay feather, miscellaneously applied to several blazing stars, is especially deserved by this showy beauty of the family.

Unlike others of its class, the DENSE BUTTON SNAKEROOT, DEVIL'S BIT, ROUGH or BACKACHE ROOT, PRAIRIE PINE or THROATWORT (L. spicata), the commonest species we have, chooses moist soil, even salt marshes near the coast, and low meadows throughout a range nearly corresponding with that of the scaly blazing star. Resembling its relatives in general manner of growth, we note that its oblong involucre, rounded at the base, has blunt, not sharply pointed, bracts; that the flower-heads are densely set close to the wand for from four to fifteen inches; that the five to thirteen bright rose-purple florets which compose each head occasionally come white; that its leaves are long and very narrow, and that October is not too late to find the plant in bloom.

BLUE and PURPLE ASTERS or STARWORTS Thistle family