Chapter 8

No; the bee’s happiness rests on her knowledge that only the butterflies’ long tongues can honestly share with her the brimming wells of nectar in each tiny floret. Children who have sucked them too appreciate her rapture. If we examine a little flower under the magnifying glass, we shall see why its structure places it in the pea family. Bumblebees so depress the keel either when they sip, or feed on pollen, that their heads and tongues get well dusted with the yellow powder, which they transfer to the stigmas of other flowers; whereas the butterflies are of doubtful value, if not injurious, since their long, slender tongues easily drain the nectar without depressing the keel. Even if a few grains of pollen should cling to their tongues, it would probably be wiped off as they withdrew them through the narrow slit, where the petals nearly meet, at the mouth of the flower. _Bombus terrestris_ delights in nipping holes at the base of the tube, which other pilferers also profit by. Our country is so much richer in butterflies than Europe, it is scarcely surprising that Professor Robertson found thirteen Lepidoptera out of twenty insect visitors to this clover in Illinois, whereas Muller caught only eight butterflies on it out of a list of thirty-nine visitors in Germany. The fritillaries and the sulphurs are always seen about the clover fields among many others, and the “dusky wings” and the caterpillar of several species feed almost exclusively on this plant.

“To live in clover,” from the insect’s point of view at least, may well mean a life of luxury and affluence. Most peasants in Europe will tell you that a dream about the flower foretells not only a happy marriage, but long life and prosperity. For ages the clover has been counted a mystic plant, and all sorts of good and bad luck were said to attend the finding of variations of its leaves which had more than the common number of leaflets. At evening these leaflets fold downward, the side ones like two hands clasped in prayer, the end one bowed over them. In this fashion the leaves of the white and other clovers also go to sleep, to protect their sensitive surfaces from cold by radiation, it is thought.

White Sweet Clover; Bokhara or Tree Clover; White Melilot; Honey Lotus

_Melilotus alba_

_Flowers_--Small, white, fragrant, papilionaceous, the standard petal a trifle longer than the wings; borne in slender racemes. _Stem:_ 3 to 10 ft. tall, branching. _Leaves:_ Rather distant, petioled, compounded of 3 oblong, saw-edged leaflets; fragrant, especially when dry.

_Preferred Habitat_--Waste lands, roadsides.

_Flowering Season_--June-November.

_Distribution_--United States, Europe, Asia.

Both the White and the Yellow Sweet Clover put their leaves to sleep at night in a remarkable manner: the three leaflets of each leaf twist through an angle of 90 degrees, until one edge of each vertical blade is uppermost. The two side leaflets, Darwin found, always tend to face the north with their upper surface, one facing north-northwest and the other north-northeast, while the terminal leaflet escapes the chilling of its sensitive upper surface through radiation by twisting to a vertical also, but bending to either east or west, until it comes in contact with the vertical upper surface of either of the side leaflets. Thus the upper surface of the terminal and of at least one of the side leaflets is sure to be well protected through the night; one is “left out in the cold.”

The dried branches of sweet clover will fill a room with delightful fragrance; but they will not drive away flies, nor protect woollens from the ravages of moths, as old women once taught us to believe.

* * * * *

The ubiquitous White or Dutch Clover (_Trifolium repens_), whose creeping branches send up solitary round heads of white or pinkish flowers on erect, leafless stems, from May to December, in fields, open waste land, and cultivated places throughout our area, Europe, and Asia, devotes itself to wooing bees, since these are the only insects that effect cross-fertilization regularly, other visitors aiding it only occasionally. Its foliage is the favorite food of very many species of caterpillars and of all grazing cattle the world around. This is still another plant frequently miscalled shamrock. Good luck or bad attends the finding of the leaves, when compounded of an even or an odd number of leaflets more than the normal count, according to the saying of many simple-minded folk.

Blue, Tufted, or Cow Vetch or Tare; Cat Peas; Tinegrass

_Vicia Cracca_

_Flowers_--Blue, later purple; 1/2 in. long, growing downward in 1-sided spike, 15 to 40 flowered; calyx oblique, small, with unequal teeth; corolla butterfly-shaped, consisting of standard, wings, and keel, all oblong; the first clawed, the second oblique, and adhering to the shorter keel; 10 stamens, 1 detached from other 9. _Stem:_ Slender, weak, climbing or trailing, downy, 2 to 4 ft. long. _Leaves:_ Tendril bearing, divided into 18 to 24 thin, narrow, oblong leaflets. _Fruit:_ A smooth pod 1 in. long or less, 5 to 8 seeded.

_Preferred Habitat_--Dry soil, fields, waste land.

_Flowering Season_--June-August.

_Distribution_--United States from New Jersey, Kentucky, and Iowa northward and northwestward. Europe and Asia.

Dry fields blued with the bright blossoms of the Tufted Vetch, and roadsides and thickets where the angular vine sends forth vivid patches of color, resound with the music of happy bees. Although the parts of the flower fit closely together, they are elastic, and opening with the energetic visitor’s weight and movement give ready access to the nectary. On his departure they resume their original position, to protect both nectar and pollen from rain and pilferers whose bodies are not perfectly adapted to further the flower’s cross-fertilization. The common bumblebee (_Bombus terrestris_) plays a mean trick, all too frequently, when he bites a hole at the base of the blossom, not only gaining easy access to the sweets for himself, but opening the way for others less intelligent than he, but quite ready to profit by his mischief, and so defeat nature’s plan. Doctor Ogle observed that the same bee always acts in the same manner, one sucking the nectar legitimately, another always biting a hole to obtain it surreptitiously, the natural inference, of course, being that some bees, like small boys, are naturally depraved.

Ground-nut

_Apios tuberosa (A. Apios)_

_Flowers_--Fragrant, chocolate brown and reddish purple, numerous, about 1/2 in. long, clustered in racemes from the leaf axils. Calyx 2-lipped, corolla papilionaceous, the broad standard petal turned backward, the keel sickle-shaped; stamens within it 9 and 1. _Stem:_ From tuberous, edible rootstock; climbing, slender, several feet long, the juice milky. _Leaves:_ Compounded of 5 to 7 ovate leaflets. _Fruit:_ A leathery, slightly curved pod, 2 to 4 in. long.

_Preferred Habitat_--Twining about undergrowth and thickets in moist or wet ground.

_Flowering Season_--July-September.

_Distribution_--New Brunswick to Ontario, south to the Gulf states and Kansas.

No one knows better than the omnivorous “barefoot boy” that

“Where the ground-nut trails its vine”

there is hidden something really good to eat under the soft, moist soil where legions of royal fern, usually standing guard above it, must be crushed before he digs up the coveted tubers. He would be the last to confuse it with the Wild Kidney Bean or Bean Vine (_Phaseolus polystachyus_). The latter has loose racemes of smaller purple flowers and leaflets in threes; nevertheless it is often confounded with the ground-nut vine by older naturalists whose knowledge was “learned of schools.”

Wild or Hog Peanut

_Amphicarpa monoica (Falcata comosa)_

_Flowers_--Numerous small, showy ones, borne in drooping clusters from axils of upper leaves; lilac, pale purplish, or rarely white, butterfly-shaped, consisting of standard petal partly enfolding wings and keel. Calyx tubular, 4 or 5 toothed; 10 stamens (9 and 1); 1 pistil. (Also solitary fertile flowers, lacking petals, on thread-like, creeping branches from lower axils or underground.) _Stem:_ Twining wiry brownish-hairy, 1 to 8 ft. long. _Leaves:_ Compounded of 3 thin leaflets, egg-shaped at base, acutely pointed at tip. _Fruit:_ Hairy pod 1 in. long. Also 1-seeded, pale, rounded, underground peanut.

_Preferred Habitat_--Moist thickets, shady roadsides.

_Flowering Season_--August-September.

_Distribution_--New Brunswick westward to Nebraska, south to Gulf of Mexico.

_Amphicarpa_ (“seed at both ends”), the Greek name by which this graceful vine is sometimes known, emphasizes its most interesting feature, that, nevertheless, seems to many a foolish duplication of energy on Nature’s part. Why should the same plant bear two kinds of blossoms and seeds? Among the foliage of low shrubbery and plants in shady lanes and woodside thickets, we see the delicate, drooping clusters of lilac blossoms hanging where bees can readily discover them and, in pilfering their sweets, transfer their pollen from flower to flower. But in case of failure to intercross these blossoms that are dependent upon insect help to set fertile seed, what then? Must the plant run the risk of extinction? Self-fertilization may be an evil, but failure to produce seed at all is surely the greatest one. To guard against such a calamity, insignificant looking flowers that have no petals to open for the enticing of insects, but which fertilize themselves with their own pollen, produce abundant seed close to the ground or under it. Then what need of the showy blossoms hanging in the thicket above? Close inbreeding in the vegetable world, as in the animal, ultimately produces degenerate offspring; and although the showy lilac blossoms of the wild peanut yield comparatively few cross-fertilized seeds, these are quite sufficient to enable the vine to maintain those desired features which are the inheritance from ancestors that struggled in their day and generation after perfection. No plant dares depend upon its cleistogamous or blind flowers alone for offspring; and in the sixty or more genera containing these curious growths, that usually look like buds arrested in development, every plant that bears them bears also showy flowers dependent upon cross-pollination by insect aid.

The boy who:

“Drives home the cows from the pasture Up through the long shady lane”

knows how reluctantly they leave the feast afforded by the wild peanut. Hogs, rooting about in the moist soil where it grows, unearth the hairy pods that should produce next year’s vines; hence the poor excuse for branding a charming plant with a repellent folk-name.

This plant should not be confused with pig-nut (_carya porcina_), which is a species of hickory.

WOOD-SORREL FAMILY _(Oxalidaceae)_

White or True Wood-sorrel; Alleluia

_Oxalis acetosella_

_Flowers_--White or delicate pink, veined with deep pink, about 1/2 in. long. Five sepals; 5 spreading petals rounded at tips; 10 stamens, 5 longer, 5 shorter, all anther-bearing; 1 pistil with 5 stigmatic styles. _Scape:_ Slender, leafless, 1-flowered, 2 to 5 in. high. _Leaf:_ Clover-like, of 3 leaflets, on long petioles from scaly, creeping rootstock.

_Preferred Habitat_--Cold, damp woods.

_Flowering Season_--May-July.

_Distribution_--Nova Scotia and Manitoba, southward to North Carolina. Also a native of Europe.

Clumps of these delicate little pinkish blossoms and abundant leaves, cuddled close to the cold earth of northern forests, usually conceal near the dry leaves or moss from which they spring blind flowers that never open--cleistogamous the botanists call them--flowers that lack petals, as if they were immature buds; that lack odor, nectar, and entrance; yet they are perfectly mature, self-fertilized, and abundantly fruitful. Fifty-five genera of plants contain one or more species on which these peculiar products are found, the pea family having more than any other, although violets offer perhaps the most familiar instance to most of us. Many of these species bury their offspring below ground; but the wood-sorrel bears its blind flowers nodding from the top of a curved scape at the base of the plant, where we can readily find them. By having no petals, and other features assumed by an ordinary flower to attract insects, and chiefly in saving pollen, they produce seed with literally the closest economy. It is estimated that the average blind flower of the wood-sorrel does its work with four hundred pollen grains, while the prodigal peony scatters with the help of wind and insect visitors more than three and a half millions!

As self-fertilization is impossible, the showy blossoms of the wood-sorrel are a necessity not a luxury; for the insects must not be allowed to overlook them.

Every child knows how the wood-sorrel “goes to sleep” by drooping its three leaflets until they touch back to back at evening, regaining the horizontal at sunrise--a performance most scientists now agree protects the peculiarly sensitive leaf from cold by radiation. During the day as well, seedling, scape, and leaves go through some interesting movements, closely followed by Darwin in his “Power of Movement in Plants,” which should be read by all interested.

_Oxalis_, the Greek for sour, applies to all sorrels because of their acid juice; but _acetosella_ = vinegar salt, the specific name of this plant, indicates that from it druggists obtain salt of lemons. Twenty pounds of leaves yield between two and three ounces of oxalic acid by crystallization. Names locally given the plant in the Old World are wood sour or sower, cuckoo’s meat, sour trefoil, and shamrock--for this is St. Patrick’s own flower, the true shamrock of the ancient Irish, some claim. Alleluia, another folk-name, refers to the joyousness of the Easter season, when the plant comes into bloom in England.

Violet Wood-sorrel

_Oxalis violacea_

_Flowers_--Pinkish purple, lavender, or pale magenta; less than 1 in. long; borne on slender stems in umbels or forking clusters, each containing from 3 to 12 flowers. Calyx of 5 obtuse sepals; 5 petals; 10 (5 longer, 5 shorter) stamens; 5 styles persistent above 5-celled ovary. _Stem:_ From brownish, scaly bulb 4 to 9 in. high. _Leaves:_ About 1 in. wide, compounded of 3 rounded, clover-like leaflets with prominent midrib borne at end of slender petioles, springing from root.

_Preferred Habitat_--Rocky and sandy woods.

_Flowering Season_--May-June.

_Distribution_--Northern United States to Rocky Mountains, south to Florida and New Mexico; more abundant southward.

Beauty of leaf and blossom is not the only attraction possessed by this charming little plant. As a family the wood-sorrels have great interest for botanists since Darwin devoted such exhaustive study to their power of movement, and many other scientists have described the several forms assumed by perfect flowers of the same species to secure cross-fertilization. Some members of the clan also bear blind flowers, which have been described in the account of the white wood-sorrel. Even the rudimentary leaves of the seedlings “go to sleep” at evening, and during the day are in constant movement up and down. The stems, too, are restless; and as for the mature leaves, every child knows how they droop their three leaflets back to back against the stem at evening, elevating them to the perfect horizontal again by day. Extreme sensitiveness to light has been thought to be the true explanation of so much activity, and yet this is not a satisfactory theory in many cases. It is certain that drooping leaves suffer far less from frost than those whose upper surfaces are flatly exposed to the zenith. This view that the sleep of leaves saves them from being chilled at night by radiation is Darwin’s own, supported by innumerable experiments; and probably it would have been advanced by Linnaeus, too, since so many of his observations in “Somnus Plantarum” verify the theory, had the principle of radiation been discovered in his day.

GERANIUM FAMILY _(Geraniaceae)_

Wild or Spotted Geranium or Crane’s-Bill; Alum-root

_Geranium maculatum_

_Flowers_--Pale magenta, purplish pink, or lavender, regular, 1 to 1-1/2 in. broad, solitary or a pair, borne on elongated peduncles, generally with pair of leaves at their base. Calyx of 5 lapping, pointed sepals; 5 petals, woolly at base; 10 stamens; 1 pistil with 5 styles. _Fruit:_ A slender capsule pointed like a crane’s bill. In maturity it ejects seeds elastically far from the parent plant. _Stem:_ 1 to 2 ft. high, hairy, slender, simple or branching above. _Leaves:_ Older ones sometimes spotted with white; basal ones 3 to 6 in. wide, 3 to 5 parted, variously cleft and toothed; 2 stem leaves opposite.

_Preferred Habitat_--Open woods, thickets, and shady roadsides.

_Flowering Season_--April-July.

_Distribution_--Newfoundland to Georgia, and westward a thousand miles.

Sprengel, who was the first to exalt flowers above the level of mere botanical specimens, had his attention led to the intimate relationship existing between plants and insects by studying out the meaning of the hairy corolla of the common Wild Geranium of Germany _(G. sylvaticum)_, being convinced, as he wrote in 1787, that “the wise Author of Nature has not made even a single hair without a definite design.” A hundred years before, Nehemias Grew had said that it was necessary for pollen to reach the stigma of a flower in order that it might set fertile seed; and Linnaeus had to come to his aid with conclusive evidence to convince a doubting world that this was true. Sprengel made the next step forward, but his writings lay neglected over seventy years because he advanced the then incredible and only partially true statement that a flower is fertilized by insects which carry its pollen from its anthers to its stigma. In spite of his discoveries that the hairs inside the geranium’s corolla protect its nectar from rain for the insect’s benefit, just as eyebrows keep perspiration from falling into the eye; that most flowers which secrete nectar have what he termed “honey guides”--spots of bright color, heavy veining, or some such pathfinder on the petals--in spite of the most patient and scientific research that shed great light on natural selection a half-century before Darwin advanced the theory, he left it for the author of “The Origin of Species” to show that cross-fertilization--the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another, not from anthers to stigma of the same flower--is the great end to which so much marvellous mechanism is chiefly adapted. Cross-fertilized blossoms defeat self-fertilized flowers in the struggle for existence.

No wonder Sprengel’s theory was disproved by his scornful contemporaries in the very case of his Wild Geranium, which sheds its pollen before it has developed a stigma to receive any; therefore no insect that had not brought pollen from an earlier bloom could possibly fertilize this flower. How amazing that he did not see this! Our common wild crane’s-bill, which also has lost the power to fertilize itself, not only ripens first the outer, then the inner, row of anthers, but actually drops them off after their pollen has been removed, to overcome the barest chance of self-fertilization as the stigmas become receptive. This is the geranium’s and many other flowers’ method to compel cross-fertilization by insects. In cold, stormy, cloudy weather a geranium blossom may remain in the male stage several days before becoming female; while on a warm, sunny day, when plenty of insects are flying, the change sometimes takes place in a few hours. Among others, the common sulphur or puddle butterfly, that sits in swarms on muddy roads and makes the clover fields gay with its bright little wings, pilfers nectar from the geranium without bringing its long tongue in contact with the pollen. Neither do the smaller bees and flies which alight on the petals necessarily come in contact with the anthers and stigmas. Doubtless the larger bees are the flowers’ true benefactors.

The so-called geraniums in cultivation are pelargoniums, strictly speaking.

Herb Robert; Red Robin; Red Shanks; Dragon’s Blood

_Geranium Robertianum_

_Flowers_--Purplish rose, about 1/2 in. across, borne chiefly in pairs on slender peduncles. Five sepals and petals; stamens 10; pistil with 5 styles. _Stem_: Weak, slender, much branched, forked, and spreading, slightly hairy, 6 to 18 in. high. _Leaves_: Strongly scented, opposite, thin, of 3 divisions, much subdivided and cleft. _Fruit_: Capsular, elastic, the beak 1 in. long, awn-pointed.

_Preferred Habitat_--Rocky, moist woods and shady roadsides.

_Flowering Season_--May-October.

_Distribution_--Nova Scotia to Pennsylvania, and westward to Missouri.

Who was the Robert for whom this his “holy herb” was named? Many suppose that he was St. Robert, a Benedictine monk, to whom the twenty-ninth of April--the day the plant comes into flower in Europe--is dedicated. Others assert that Robert Duke of Normandy, for whom the “Ortus Sanitatis,” a standard medical guide for some hundred of years, was written, is the man honored; and since there is now no way of deciding the mooted question, we may take our choice.

Only when the stems are young are they green; later the plant well earns the name of Red Shanks, and when its leaves show crimson stains, of Dragon’s Blood.

At any time the herb gives forth a disagreeable odor, but especially when its leaves and stem have been crushed until they emit a resinous secretion once an alleged cure for the plague.

MILKWORT FAMILY _(Polygalaceae)_

Fringed Milkwort or Polygala; Flowering Wintergreen; Gay Wings

_Polygala paucifolia_

_Flowers_--Purplish rose, rarely white, showy, over 1/2 in. long, from 1 to 4 on short, slender peduncles from among upper leaves. Calyx of 5 unequal sepals, of which 2 are wing-like and highly colored like petals. Corolla irregular, its crest finely fringed; 6 stamens; 1 pistil. Also pale, pouch-like, cleistogamous flowers underground. _Stem_: Prostrate, 6 to 15 in. long, slender, from creeping rootstock, sending up flowering shoots 4 to 7 in. high. _Leaves_: Clustered at summit, oblong, or pointed egg-shaped, 1-1/2 in. long or less; those on lower part of shoots scale-like.

_Preferred Habitat_--Moist, rich woods, pine lands, light soil.

_Flowering Season_--May-July.

_Distribution_--Northern Canada, southward and westward to Georgia and Illinois.

Gay companies of these charming, bright little blossoms hidden away in the woods suggest a swarm of tiny mauve butterflies that have settled among the wintergreen leaves. Unlike the common milkwort and many of its kin that grow in clover-like heads, each one of the gay wings has beauty enough to stand alone. Its oddity of structure, its lovely color and enticing fringe, lead one to suspect it of extraordinary desire to woo some insect that will carry its pollen from blossom to blossom and so enable the plant to produce cross-fertilized seed to counteract the evil tendencies resulting from the more prolific self-fertilized cleistogamous flowers buried in the ground below.

Common, Field, or Purple Milkwort; Purple Polygala

_Polygala sanguinea (P. viridescens)_

_Flowers_--Numerous, very small, variable; bright magenta pink, or almost red, or pale to whiteness, or greenish, clustered in a globular clover-like head, gradually lengthening to a cylindric spike. _Stem_: 6 to 15 in. high, smooth, branched above, leafy. _Leaves_: Alternate, narrowly oblong, entire.

_Preferred Habitat_--Fields and meadows, moist or sandy.

_Flowering Season_--June-September.

_Distribution_--Southern Canada to North Carolina, westward to the Mississippi.