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. When nets are stretched over these flowers to exclude insects, only one-tenth the normal quantity of fertile seed is set. Therefore, for the bee's benefit, does each little floret conceal nectar in a tube so deep that small pilferers cannot reach it; but when a honeybee, for example, depresses the keel of the papilionaceous blossom, abundant reward awaits him in consideration of his services in transferring pollen. After the floret which he has been the means of fertilizing closes over its seed-vessel on his departure, it gradually withers, grows brown, and hangs downward, partly to indicate to the next bee that comes along which fords in the head still contain nectar, and which are done for; partly to hide the precious little vigorous green seed-pod in the center of each withered, papery corolla from the visitation of certain insects whose minute grubs destroy countless millions of the progeny of less careful plants. Thus the erect florets in a head stand awaiting their benefactors; those drooping around the outer edge are engaged in the most serious business of life. Sometimes a solitary old maid remains standing, looking anxiously for a lover, at the end of the season. Usually all the florets are then bent down around the stem in a brown and crumpled mass. But however successfully the clover guards its seeds from annihilation, 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.

The little RABBIT'S-FOOT, PUSSY, OLD-FIELD, or STONE CLOVER (T. arvense) has silky plumed calices to hold its minute whitish florets, giving the dense, oblong heads a charming softness and dove color after it has gone to seed. Like most other clovers, it has come to us from the Old World.

FLOWERING SPURGE (Euphorbia corollata) Spurge family

Flowers - (Apparently) white, small, borne in forked, long-stalked umbels, subtended by green bracts; but the true flowers are minute, and situated within the white cup-shaped involucre, usually mistaken for a corolla. Staminate flowers scattered over inner surface of involucre, each composed of a single stamen on a thread-like pedicel with a rudimentary calyx or tiny bract below it. A solitary pistillate flower at bottom of involucre, consisting of 3-celled ovary; 3 styles, 2-cleft, at length forming an erect 3-lobed capsule separating into 3 2-valved carpels. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, often brightly spotted, simple below, umbellately 5-branched above (usually). Leaves: Linear, lance-shaped or oblong, entire; lower ones alternate, upper ones whorled. Preferred Habitat - Dry soil, gravelly or sandy. Flowering Season - April-October. Distribution - From Kansas and Ontario to the Atlantic.

A very commonplace and uninteresting looking weed is this spurge, which no one but a botanist would suspect of kinship with the brilliant vermilion poinsettia, so commonly grown in American greenhouses. Examination shows that these little bright white cups of the flowering spurge, simulating a five-cleft corolla, are no more the true flowers in the one case than the large red bracts around the poinsettia's globular greenish blossom involucres are in the other. From the milky juice alone one might guess the spurge to be related to the rubber plant. Still another familiar cousin is the stately castor-oil plant; and while the common dull purplish IPECAC SPURGE (E. Ipecacuanhae) also suggests unpleasant doses, it is really a member of quite another family that furnishes the old-fashioned emetic. The flowering spurge, having its staminate and pistillate flowers distinct, depends upon flies, its truest benefactors, to transfer pollen from the former to the latter.

STAGHORN SUMAC; VINEGAR TREE (Rhus hirta; R. typhina of Gray) Sumac family

Flowers - Greenish or yellowish white, very small, usually 5-parted, and borne in dense upright, terminal, pyramidal clusters. Stem: A shrub or small tree, 6 to 40 ft. high, the ends of branches forked somewhat like a stag's horns. Leaves. Compounded of 11 to 31 lance-shaped, saw-edged leaflets, dark green above, pale below; the petioles and twigs often velvety-hairy. Fruit: Small globules, very thickly covered with crimson hairs. Preferred Habitat - Dry, rough or rocky places, banks, roadsides. Flowering Season - June. Distribution - Nova Scotia to Georgia, and westward 1500 miles.

Painted with glorious scarlet, crimson, and gold, the autumnal foliage of the sumacs, and even the fruit, so far eclipse their inconspicuous flowers in attractiveness that one quite ignores them. Not so the small, short-tongued bees (chiefly Andrenidae) and flies (Dipteria) seeking the freely exposed nectar secreted in five orange-colored glands in the shallow little cups. As some of the flowers are staminate and some pistillate, although others show a tendency to revert to the perfect condition of their ancestors, it behooves them to entertain their little pollen-carrying visitors generously, otherwise no seed can possibly be set. And how the autumnal landscape would suffer from the loss of the decorative, dark-red, velvety panicles! Beware only of the poison sumac's deadly, round grayish-white berries.

Most sumacs contain more or less tannin in their bark and leaves, that are therefore eagerly sought by agents for the leather merchants. The beautiful SMOKE or MIST TREE (R. cotinus), commonly imported from southern Europe to adorn our lawns (although a similar species grows wild in the Southwest), serves a more utilitarian purpose in supplying commerce with a rich orange-yellow dye-wood known as young fustic. All this tribe of shrubs and trees contain resinous, milky juice, drying dark like varnish, which in a Japanese species is transformed by the clever native artisans into their famous lacquer. With a commercial instinct worthy of the Hebrew, they guard this process as a national secret.

The SMOOTH, UPLAND, or SCARLET SUMAC (R. glabra), similar to the staghorn, but lacking its velvety down, and usually of much lower growth, is the very common and widely distributed shrub of dry roadsides, railroad banks, and barren fields. Another low-growing, but more or less downy upland sumac, the DWARF, BLACK, or MOUNTAIN SUMAC (R. copallina), may be known by its dark, glossy green foliage, pale on the underside, and by the broadening of the stem into wings between the leaflets. Hungry migrating birds alight to feast on the harmless acid red fruit when the gorgeous autumnal foliage illuminates their route southward. But while they are, of course, the natural agents for distributing the plants over the country, men find that by cutting bits of any sumac root and planting them in good garden soil, strong specimens are secured within a year. An exquisite cut-leaved variety of the smooth sumac adorns many fine lawns.

Everyone should know the POISON SUMAC (R. Vernix - R. venenata of Gray) as the shrub above all others to avoid. Like its cousin, the POISON or THREE-LEAVED IVY (R. radicans), which once had the specific name Toxicodendron, although Linnaeus applied that title to a hairy shrub of the Southern States, the poison sumac causes most painful swelling and irritation to the skin of some people, though they do nothing more than pass it by when the wind is blowing over it. Others may handle both these plants with impunity. In spring they are especially noisome; but when the pores of the skin are opened by perspiration, people who are at all sensitive should give them a wide berth at any season. Usually the poison sumac grows in wet or swampy ground; its bark is gray, its leaf-stalks are red; the leaves are compounded, of fewer leaflets than those of the innocent sumacs - that is, of from seven to thirteen - which are green on both sides; the flowers, which are dull whitish-green, grow in loose panicles from the axils of the leaves, and naturally the berries follow them in the same unusual situation. "By their fruits ye shall know them:" all the harmless sumacs have red fruit clusters at the ends of the branches, whereas both the poison sumac's and the poison ivy's axillary clusters are dull grayish-white.

AMERICAN HOLLY (Ilex opaca) Holly family

Flowers - Very small, greenish or yellowish white, from 3 to 10 staminate ones in a short cyme; fertile flowers usually solitary, scattered. Stem: A small tree of very slow growth, rarely attaining any great height. Leaves: Evergreen, thick, rigid, glossy, elliptical, scalloped edged, spiny-tipped. Fruit: Round, red berries. Preferred Habitat - Moist woods and thickets. Flowering Season - April-June. Distribution - Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, west to Texas, chiefly near the coast and south of New York.

Happily we continue to borrow all the beautiful Old World associations, poetical and legendary, that cluster about the holly at Christmas time, although our native tree furnishes most of our holiday decorations. So far back as Pliny's day, the European holly had all manner of supernatural qualities attributed to it: its insignificant little flowers caused water to freeze, he tells us; because it was believed to repel lightning, the Romans planted it near their houses; and a branch of it thrown after any refractory animal, even if it did not hit him, would subdue him instantly, and cause him to lie down meekly beside the stick! Can it be that the Italian peasants, who still believe cattle kneel in their stalls at midnight on the anniversary of Jesus' birth, decorate the mangers on Christmas eve with holly, among other plants, because of a survival of this old pagan notion about its subduing effect on animals?

Would that the beautiful holly of English gardens (I. Aquifolium), more glossy and spiny of leaf and redder of berry than our own, might live here; but it is too tender to withstand New England winters, and the hot, dry summers farther south soon prove fatal. Ilex was the ancient name, not of these plants, but of the holly oak.

The MOUNTAIN HOLLY (Ilicioides mucronata - Nemopanthes Canadensis of Gray) a shrub of the northern swamps, about six feet high, and by no means confined to mountainous regions, since it is also abundant in the middle West, has smooth-edged, elliptic, petioled leaves, ash-colored bark, small, solitary, narrow-petalled staminate and pistillate flowers on long, threadlike pedicels from the leaf-axils in May. In August dull pale-red berries appear. Darwin proved that seed set with the help of pollen brought from distinct plants produces offspring that vanquishes the offspring of seed set with pollen brought from another flower on the same plant in the struggle for existence. Thus we see, in very many ambitious plants besides those of the holly tribe, a tendency to separate the male and the female flowers as widely as possible.

BLACK ALDER; WINTERBERRY FEVER-BUSH (Ilex verticillata) Holly family

Flowers - Small, greenish white, the staminate clusters 2 to 10 flowered the fertile ones 1 to 3 flowered. Stem: A shrub 6 to 25 ft. high. Leaves: Oval, tapering to a point, about 1 in. wide, saw-edged, dark green, smooth above, hairy, especially along veins underneath. Fruit: Bright red berries, about the size of a pea, apparently whorled around the twigs. Preferred Habitat - Swamps, ditches, fencerows, and low thickets. Flowering Season - June-July. Distribution - Nova Scotia to Florida, west to Missouri.

Beautiful bright red berries, dotted or clustered along the naked twigs of the black alder, add an indispensable cheeriness to the somber winter landscape. Bunches of them, commonly sold in the city streets for household decoration, bring twenty-five cents each; hence the shrubs within a large radius of each market get ample pruning every autumn. The leaves turn black before dropping off.

The SMOOTH WINTERBERRY (I. laevigata), a similar species, but of more restricted range, ripens its larger, orange-red berries earlier than the preceding, and before its leaves, which turn yellow, not black, in autumn, have fallen. Another distinguishing feature is that its small, greenish-white staminate flowers grow on long, very slender pedicels; whereas the solitary fertile flowers are much nearer the stern.

BITTERSWEET; WAX-WORK; STAFF-TREE (Celastrus scandens) Staff-tree family

Flowers - Small, greenish-white, 5-parted, some staminate, some pistillate only; in terminal compound racemes 4 in. long or less. Stem: Woody, twining. Leaves: Alternate, oval, tapering, finely toothed, thin, with a tendency to show white variations. Fruit: A yellow-orange berry-like capsule, splitting at maturity and curling back to display the scarlet, pulpy coating of the seeds within. Preferred Habitat - Rich soil of thickets, fence rows, and wayslde tangles. Flowering Season - June. Distribution - North Carolina, New Mexico, and far north.

Not to be hung above mirror and picture frames in farmhouse parlors, as we have been wont to think, do the brilliant clusters of orange-red wax-work berries attract the eye, where they brighten old walls, copses, and fence rows in autumn; but to advertise their charming wares to hungry migrating birds, which will drop the seeds concealed within the red berry perhaps a thousand miles away, and so plant new colonies. On the smaller, less specialized bees and flies the vine depends in June to carry pollen from its staminate flowers to the fertile ones, whose thick, erect pistil would wither without fruiting without their help.

But the best laid plans of other creatures than mice and men "gang aft a-gley." What mean the little cottony tufts all along the stems of so very many bittersweet vines, but that these have foes as well as friends? Curious little parasitic tree-hoppers (Membracis binotata), which spend their entire lives on the stems, sucking the juices through their little beaks, just as the aphids moor themselves to the tender rose-twigs, might be mistaken for thorns during one of their protective masquerades. Again they look like diminutive flocks of fowl, their heads ever pointing in one direction, no matter how the vine may twist and turn - always toward the top of the branch, that they may the better siphon the sap down their tiny throats. Toward the end of summer the females, which have a sharp instrument at the rear of their bodies, cut deeply into the juicy food-store, the cambium layer of bark, and there deposit their eggs. Presently, a nest being filled, the mother emits a substantial froth at the end of her ovipositor, and proceeds to construct the cottony, corrugated dome over her nursery which first attracted our attention. This is especially skilful work, for she works behind her, evidently not from sight, but from instinct only. Inasmuch as the young hoppers will not come forth until the following summer, some such snug protection is required during winter's cold and snows. With hordes of little parasites constantly preying on its juices, is it any wonder the vine is often too enfeebled to produce seed, or that the leaves lose part of their color and become, as we say, variegated? Occasionally one finds the cottony nursery domes of this little hopper on the locust tree - the favorite home of its big, noisy relative, the so-called locust, or cicada.

NEW JERSEY TEA; WILD SNOWBALL; RED-ROOT (Ceanothus Americanus) Buckthorn family

Flowers - Small, white, on white pedicels, crowded in dense, oblong, terminal clusters. Calyx white, hemispheric, 5-lobed; petals, hooded and long-clawed; 5 stamens with long filaments; style short, 3-cleft. Stems: Shrubby, 1 to 3 ft. high, usually several, from a deep reddish root. Leaves: Alternate, ovate-oblong, acute at tip, finely saw-edged, 3-nerved, on short petioles. Preferred Habitat - Dry, open woods and thickets. Flowering Season - May-July. Distribution - Ontario south and west to the Gulf of Mexico.

Light, feathery clusters of white little flowers crowded on the twigs of this low shrub interested thrifty colonial housewives of Revolutionary days not at all; the tender, young, rusty, downy leaves were what they sought to dry as a substitute for imported tea. Doubtless the thought that they were thereby evading George the Third's tax and brewing patriotism in every kettleful added a sweetness to the homemade beverage that sugar itself could not impart. The American troops were glad enough to use New Jersey tea throughout the war. A nankeen or cinnamon-colored dye is made from the reddish root.

NORTHERN, WILD, FOX, or PLUM GRAPE (Vitis Labrusca) Grape family

Flowers - Greenish, small, deliciously fragrant, some staminate, some pistillate, rarely perfect; the fertile flowers in more compact panicles than the sterile ones. Stem: Climbing with the help of tendrils; woody, bark loose. Leaves: Large, rounded or lobed, toothed, rusty-hairy underneath, especially when young, each leathery leaf opposite a tendril or a flower cluster. Fruit: Clusters containing a few brownish, purple, musky-scented grapes, 3/4 in. across. Ripe, August-September. Preferred Habitat - Sunny thickets, loamy or gravelly soil. Flowering Season - June. Distribution - New England to Georgia, west to Minnesota and Tennessee.

Aesop's fox may never have touched the grapes of fable, but this, our wild species, certainly retains a strong foxy odor, which at least suggests that he came very near them. Tough pulp and thick skin by no means deter birds and beasts from feasting on this fruit, and so dispersing the seeds; but mankind prefers the tender, delightful flavored Isabella, Catawba, and Concord grapes derived from it. The Massachusetts man who produced the Concord variety in the town whose name he gave it, declares he would be a millionaire had he received only a penny royalty on every Concord grapevine planted.

What fragrance is more delicious than that of the blossoming grape? To swing in a loop made by some strong old vine, when the air almost intoxicates one with its sweetness on a June evening, is many a country child's idea of perfect bliss. Not until about nine o'clock do the leaves "go to sleep" by becoming depressed in the center like saucers. This was the signal for bedtime that one child, at least, used to wait for. We have seen in the clematis how its sensitive leafstalks hook themselves over any support they rub against; but the grapevine has gone a step farther, and by discarding an occasional flower cluster and prolonging the flower stalk into a coiling, forking tendril it moors itself to the thicket. We know that all tendrils are either transformed leaves, as in the case of the pea vine, where each branch of its tendril represents a modified leaflet; or they are transformed flower stalks or other organs. Occasionally the tendril of a grapevine reveals its ancestry by bearing a blossom or a cluster of flowers, and sometimes even fruit, about midway on the coil, which attempts to fill all offices at once like Pooh Bah.

The phylloxera having destroyed many of the finest vineyards in Europe, it would seem that Americans have the best of chances to supply the world with high-class wines, for there is not a State in the Union where the vine will not flourish. Here its worst enemy is mildew, a parasitical fungus which attacks the leaves, revealing itself in yellowish-brown patches on the upper side, and thin, frosty patches underneath. Soon the leaves become sere, and then they fall. The microscope reveals a miniature forest of growth in each leaf, with the threadlike roots of the fungi searching about the leaf cells for food. To burn old leaves, and to blow sulphur over the vine while it is wet, are efficacious remedies. Bees and wasps which puncture grapes to feast on them, are the innocent means of destroying quantities.

Both the RIVERSIDE or SWEET-SCENTED GRAPE (V. vulpina; formerly V. cordifolia, var. riparia) - whose bluish-black, bloom-covered fruit begins to ripen in July; and the FROST, CHICKEN, POSSUM, or WINTER GRAPE (V. cordifolia), whose smaller, shining black berries are not at their best till after frost, grow along streams and preferably in rocky situations. The shining, light green, thin leaves of the sweet-scented species are sharply lobed, the three to seven lobes have acute teeth, and the tendrils are intermittent. The frost grape's leaves, which are commonly three or four inches wide, are deeply heart-shaped, entire (rarely slightly three-lobed), tapering to a long point and acutely toothed.

Another familiar member of the Grape family, the VIRGINIA CREEPER, FALSE GRAPE, AMERICAN or FIVE-LEAVED IVY, also erroneously called WOODBINE (Parthenocissus quinquefolia; formerly Ampelopsis quinquefolia) - is far more charming in its glorious autumnal foliage, when its small dark blue berries hang from red peduncles, than when its insignificant greenish flower clusters appear in July. The leaves, compounded of five leaflets, should sufficiently distinguish the harmless vine from the three-leaved poison ivy, sometimes confounded with it. From Manitoba and Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, and even in Cuba, the Virginia creeper rambles over thickets, fences, and walls, ascends trees, festoons rocky woodlands, drapes our verandas, making its way with the help of modified flower stalks that are now branching tendrils, each branch bearing an adhesive disk at the end. "In the course of about two days after a tendril has arranged its branches so as to press upon any surface," says Darwin, "its curved tips swell, become bright red, and form on their undersides little disks or cushions with which they adhere firmly." It is supposed that these disks secrete a cement. At any rate, we know that they have a very tenacious hold, because often one contracting tendril, as elastic as a steel spring, supports, by means of these little disks, the entire weight of the branch it lifts up. Darwin concluded that a tendril with five disk-bearing branches, on which he experimented, would stand a strain of ten pounds, even after ten years' exposure to high winds and softening rains.

WHITE VIOLETS (Viola) Violet family

Three small-flowered, white, purple-veined, and almost beardless species which prefer to dwell in moist meadows, damp, mossy places, and along the borders of streams, are the LANCE-LEAVED VIOLET (V. lanceolata), the PRIMROSE-LEAVED VIOLET (V. prirnulaefolia), and the SWEET WHITE VIOLET (V. blanda), whose leaves show successive gradations from the narrow, tapering, smooth, long-petioled blades of the first to the oval form of the second and the almost circular, cordate leaf of the delicately fragrant, little white blanda, the dearest violet of all. Inasmuch as these are short-spurred species, requiring no effort for bees to drain their nectaries, no footholds in the form of beards on the side petals are provided for them. The purple veinings show the stupidest visitor the path to the sweets.

The sprightly CANADA VIOLET (V. Canadensis), widely distributed in woodlands, chiefly in hilly and mountainous regions, rears tall, leafy stems terminated by faintly fragrant white or pale lavender blossoms, purple-tinged without and purple veined, the side petals bearded, the long sepals tapering to sharp points. Here we see a violet in the process of changing from the white ancestral type to the purple color which Sir John Lubbock, among other scientists, considers the highest step in chromatic evolution. This species has heart-shaped, saw-edged leaves which taper acutely. From May even to July is its regular blooming season; but the delightful family eccentricity of flowering again in autumn appears to be a confirmed habit with the Canada violet.

ENCHANTER'S NIGHTSHADE (Circaea Lutetiana) Evening Primrose family

Flowers - Very small, white, slender pedicelled, in terminal and lateral racemes. Calyx 2-parted, hairy 2 petals, 2 alternate stamens. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high, slender, branching, swollen at nodes. Leaves: Opposite, tapering to a point, distantly toothed, 2 to 4 in. long, slender petioled. Fruit: Pear-shaped, 2-celled, densely covered with stiff, hooked hairs. Preferred Habitat - Woods; shady roadsides. Flowering Season - June-August. Distribution - Nova Scotia to Georgia, westward to Nebraska. Europe and Asia.

Why Circe, the enchantress, skilled in the use of poisonous herbs, should have had her name applied to this innocent and insignificant looking little plant is not now obvious; neither is the title of nightshade any more appropriate.

Each tiny flower having a hairy calyx, that acts as a stockade against ants and other such crawling pilferers, we suspect there are abundant sweets secreted in the fleshy ring at the base of the styles for the benefit of the numerous flies seen hovering about. Among other visitors, watch the common housefly alighting on the knobby stigma, a most convenient landing place, where he leaves some pollen carried on his underside from other nightshade blossoms. In clasping the bases of the two pliable stamens, his only available supports as he sucks, he will surely get well dusted again, that he may fertilize the next blossom he flies to for refreshment. The nightshade's little pear-shaped seed vessels, armed with hooked bristles by which they steal a ride on any passing petticoat or trouser leg, reveal at a glance how this plant has contrived to travel around the globe.

A smaller, weaker species (Circaea alpina), found in cool, moist woods, chiefly north, has thin, shining leaves and soft, hooked hairs on its vagabond seeds. Less dependence seems to be placed on these ineffective hooks to help perpetuate the plant than on the tiny pink bulblets growing at the end of an exceedingly slender thread sent out by the parent roots.

AMERICAN SPIKENARD; INDIAN ROOT; SPIGNET (Aralia racemosa) Ginseng family

Flowers - Greenish white, small, 5-parted, mostly imperfect, in a drooping compound raceme of rounded clusters. Stem: 3 to 6 ft. high, branches spreading. Roots: Large, thick, fragrant. Leaves: Compounded of heart-shaped, sharply tapering, saw-edged leaflets from 2 to 5 in. long, often downy underneath. Lower leaves often enormous. Fruit: Dark reddish-brown berries. Preferred Habitat - Rich open woods, wayside thickets, light soil. Flowering Season - July-August. Distribution - New Brunswick to Georgia, west to the Mississippi.

A striking, decorative plant, once much sought after for its medicinal virtues - still another herb with which old women delight to dose their victims for any malady from a cold to a carbuncle. Quite a different plant, but a relative, is the one with hairy, spike-like shoots from its fragrant roots, from which the "very precious" ointment poured by Mary upon the Saviour's head was made. The nard, an Indian product from that plant, which is still found growing on the distant Himalayas, could then be imported into Palestine only by the rich.

The wild spikenard, or false Solomon's seal, has not the remotest connection with this tribe of plants. Inasmuch as some of the American spikenard's tiny flowers are staminate and some pistillate, while others again are perfect, they depend upon flies chiefly - but on some wasps and beetles, too - to transfer pollen and enable the fertile ones to set seed. How certain of the winter birds gormandize on the resinous, spicy little berries! A flock of juncos will strip the fruit from every spikenard in the neighborhood the first day it arrives from the North.

The WILD or FALSE SARSAPARILLA (A. nudicaulis), so common in woods, hillsides, and thickets, shelters its three spreading umbels of greenish-white flowers in May and June beneath a canopy formed by a large, solitary, compound leaf. The aromatic roots, which run horizontally sometimes three feet or more through the soil, send up a very short, smooth proper stem which lifts a tall leafstalk and a shorter, naked flower stalk. The single large leaf, of exquisite bronzy tints when young, is compounded of from three to five oval, toothed leaflets on each of its three divisions. The tiny five-parted flowers have their petals curved backward over the calyx to make their refreshments more accessible for the flies, on which they chiefly rely for aid in producing those close clusters of dark-purple berries on which migrating birds feast in early autumn. By these agents the plant has been distributed from Newfoundland to the Carolinas, westward from Manitoba to Missouri, which is not surprising when we remember that certain birds travel from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes in a single night. While the true sarsaparilla of medicine should come from a quite different herb that flourishes in Mexico and South America, this one furnishes a commercial substitute enormously used as a blood purifier and cooling summer drink. Burrowing rabbits delight to nibble the long, slender, fragrant roots.

The GINSENG (Panax quinquefolium; Aralia quinquefolia of Gray) found in rich woods from Quebec to Alabama, and westward to Nebraska - that is, where found at all, for much hunting has all but exterminated it in many regions - bears a solitary umbel of small yellowish-green, five-parted, polygamous flowers in July and August at the end of a smooth stem about a foot high. Bright crimson berries follow the clusters on the female plants in early autumn. Three long-petioled leaves, which grow in a whorl at the top of the low stem, are palmately divided into five thin, ovate, pointed, and irregularly toothed leaflets. But it is the deep fusiform root, simple or branched, about which the Americanized Chinese, at least, are most concerned. For centuries Chinese physicians have ascribed miraculous virtues to the Manchurian ginseng. Not only can it remove fatigue and restore lost powers, but by its use veterans became frisky youths again according to these wise men of the East. In short, they consider it the panacea for all ills (Panax: pan = all, akos = remedy) - the source of immortality. Naturally the roots were and are in great demand, especially such as branch so as to resemble the human form. (Both the Chinese name Schin-sen, and Garan-toguen, the Indian one, are said to mean like a man. Here is an interesting clue for the ethnologists to follow !) Imperial edict prohibited the Chinese from digging up their native plant lest it be exterminated. So Jesuit missionaries, who discovered our similar ginseng, were not slow in exporting it to China when it was literally worth its weight in gold. Indeed, it is always sold by weight - a fact on which the heathen Chinee "with ways that are dark and tricks that are vain" not infrequently relies. Chinamen, who gather large quantities in our Western States to sell to the wholesale druggists for export, sometimes drill holes into the largest roots, pour in melted lead, and plug up the drills so ingeniously that druggists refuse to pay for a Chinaman's diggings until they have handled and weighed each root separately.

The DWARF GINSENG, OR GROUND NUT (P. trifolium; Aralia trifolia of Gray) whose little white flowers are clustered in feathery, fluffy balls above the whorl of three compound leaves in April and May, chooses low thickets and moist woods for its habitat - often in the same neighborhood with its larger relative. Yellowish berries follow the fragrant white pompons. One must burrow deep, like the rabbits, to find its round, pungent, sweet, nut-like root, measuring about half an inch across, which few have ever seen.

WILD CARROT; QUEEN ANNE'S LACE; BIRD'S-NEST (Daucus Carota) Carrot family

Flowers - Small, of unequal sizes (polygamous), white, rarely pinkish gray, 5-parted, in a compound, flat, circular umbel, the central floret often dark crimson; the umbels very concave in fruit. An involucre of narrow, pinnately cut bracts. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, with stiff hairs; from a deep, fleshy, conic root. Leaves: Cut into fine, fringy divisions; upper ones smaller and less dissected. Preferred Habitat - Wastelands, fields, roadsides. Flowering Season - June-September. Distribution - Eastern half of United States and Canada. Europe and Asia.

A pest to farmers, a joy to the flower lover, and a welcome signal for refreshment to hosts of flies, beetles, bees, and wasps, especially to the paper-nest builders, the sprangly wild carrot lifts its fringy foliage and exquisite lacy, blossoms above the dry soil of three continents. From Europe it has come to spread its delicate wheels over our summer landscape, until whole fields are whitened by them east of the Mississippi. Having proved fittest in the struggle for survival in the fiercer competition of plants in the over-cultivated Old World, it takes its course of empire westward year by year, Finding most favorable conditions for colonizing in our vast, uncultivated area; and the less aggressive, native occupants of our soil are only too readily crowded out. Would that the advocates of unrestricted immigration of foreign peasants studied the parallel examples among floral invaders!

What is the secret of the wild carrots' triumphal march? As usual, it is to be sought chiefly in the flower's scheme to attract and utilize visitors. Nectar being secreted in open disks near to one another, the shortest-tongued insects can lick it up from the Umbelliferae with even less loss of time than from the tubular florets of the Cornpositae. Over sixty distinct species of insects may be taken on the wild carrot by any amateur, since it blooms while insect life is at its height but, as might be expected, the long-tongued and color-loving, specialized bees and butterflies do not often waste time on florets so easily drained by the mob. Ants find the stiff hairs on the stem disagreeable obstacles to pilfering; but no visitors seem to object to the flowers' suffocating odor.

One of these lacy, white umbels must be examined under a lens before its delicate structure and perfection of detail can be appreciated. Naturally a visitor is attracted first by the largest, most showy florets situated around the outer edge of the wheel, on which he leaves pollen, brought from another umbel; and any vitalizing dust remaining on his under side may be left on the less conspicuous hermaphrodite blossoms as he makes his way toward the center, where the tiny, pollen-bearing florets are grouped. From the latter, as he flies away, he will carry fresh pollen to the outer row of florets on another umbel, and so on - at least this is the usual and highly advantageous method. After general fertilization, the slender flower-stalks curl inward, and the umbel forms a hollow nest that gradually contracts as it dries, almost, if not quite, closing at the top, albeit the fiction that bees and spiders make their home in the seeding umbels circulates freely.

Still another fiction is that the cultivated carrot, introduced to England by the Dutch in Queen Elizabeth's reign, was derived from this wild species. Miller, the celebrated English botanist and gardener, among many others, has disproved this statement by utterly failing again and again to produce an edible vegetable from this wild root. When cultivation of the garden carrot lapses for a few generations, it reverts to the ancestral type -a species quite distinct from Daucus Carota.

SMOOTHER SWEET CICELY (Washingtonia longistylis; Osmorrhiza longistylis of Gray) Carrot family

Flowers - Small, white, 5-parted; in few rayed, long-peduncled umbels, with small bracts below them. Stem: 1 1/2 to 3 ft. high, branching, from thick, fleshy, fragrant, edible roots. Leaves: Lower ones often very large, long-petioled, thrice-compound, and again divided, the leaflets ovate, pointed, deeply toothed, slightly downy; upper leaves less compound, nearly sessile. Preferred Habitat - Rich, moist woods and thickets. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Nova Scotia to the Carolinas, westward to Dakota.

Graceful in gesture, with delicate, fernlike leaves and anise-scented roots that children, like rabbits, delight to nibble, the sweet cicely attracts attention by its fragrance, however insignificant its flowers. In wooded places, such as it prefers to dwell in, white blossoms, which are far more noticeable in a dim light than colored ones, and finely cut leaves that can best withstand the drip from trees, abound. These white umbels bear a large proportion of male, or pollen-bearing, florets to the number of hermaphrodite, or two-sexed, florets; but as the latter mature their pollen before their stigmas become susceptible to it, self-fertilization is well guarded against, and cross-fertilization is effected with the help of as many flies as small bees, which come in numbers to lick up the nectar so freely exposed in consideration of their short tongues. We have to thank these little creatures for the long, slender seeds, armed with short bristles along the ribs, that they may snatch rides on our garments, together with the beggar-ticks, burdock, cleavers, and other vagabond colonists in search of unoccupied ground. Be sure you know the difference between sweet cicely and the poisonous water hemlock before tasting the former's spicy root.

Was there no more important genus - containing, if possible, red, white, and blue flowers - to have named in honor of the Father of his Country?

Another member of the Carrot family, the SANICLE or BLACK SNAKEROOT (Sanicula Marylandica), found blooming from May to July in such rich, moist woodlands and shrubbery as the sweet cicely prefers, lifts spreading, two to four rayed umbels of insignificant-looking but interesting little greenish-white florets. At first the tips of the five petals are tucked into the center of each little flower; underneath them the stamens are now imprisoned while any danger of self-fertilizing the stigma remains. The few hermaphrodite florets have their styles protruding from the start, and incoming insects leave pollen brought from staminate florets on the early-maturing stigmas. After cross-fertilization has been effected, it is the pistil's turn to keep out of the way, and give the imprisoned stamens a chance: the styles curve until the stigmas are pressed against the sides of the ovary, that not a grain of pollen may touch them; the petals spread and release the stamens; but so great is the flower's zeal not to be fertilized with its own pollen that it sometimes holds the anthers tightly between the petals until all the vitalizing dust has been shed! Around the hermaphrodite florets are a large number of male florets in each hemispheric cluster. Hooked bristles and slender, curved styles protrude from the little burr-like seeds, that any creature passing by may give them a lift to fresh colonizing land! The firm bluish-green leaves, palmately divided into from five to seven oblong, irregularly saw-edged segments, the upper leaves seated on the stem, the lower ones long-petioled, help us to identify this common weed.

With splendid, vigorous gesture the COW-PARSNIP (Heracleum lanatum) rears itself from four to eight feet above moist, rich soil from ocean to ocean in circumpolar regions as in temperate climes. A perfect Hercules for coarseness and strength does it appear when contrasted with some of the dainty members of the carrot tribe. In June and July, when a myriad of winged creatures are flying, large, compound, many-rayed umbels of both hermaphrodite and male white flowers are spread to attract their benefactors the flies, of which twenty-one species visit them regularly, besides small bees, wasps, and other short-tongued insects, which have no difficulty in licking up the freely exposed nectar. The anthers, maturing first, compel cross-fertilization which accounts for the plant's vigor and its aggressive march across the continent. A very stout, ridged, hairy stem, the petioled leaves compounded of three broadly ovate, lobed and saw-edged divisions, downy on the underside, and the great umbels, which sometimes measure a foot across, all bear out the general impression of a Hercules of the fields.

FOOL'S PARSLEY, or CICELY, or DOG-POISON (Aethusa cynapium), a European immigrant found in waste ground and rubbish heaps from Nova Scotia to New Jersey and westward to the Mississippi, should be known only to be avoided. The dark bluish-green, finely divided, rather glossy leaves when bruised do not give out the familiar fragrance of true parsley; the little narrow bracts, turned downward around each separate flower-cluster, give it a bearded appearance, otherwise the white umbel suggests a small wild carrot head of bloom. Cows have died from eating this innocent-looking little plant among the herbage; but most creatures know by instinct that it must not be touched.

Strange that a family which furnishes the carrot, parsnip, parsley, fennel, caraway, coriander, and celery to mankind, should contain many members with deadly properties. Fortunately the large, coarse WATER HEMLOCK, SPOTTED COWBANE, MUSQUASH ROOT, or BEAVER-POISON (Cicuta maculata) has been branded as a murderer. Purple streaks along its erect branching stem correspond to the marks on Cain's brow. Above swamps and low ground it towers. Twice or thrice pinnate leaves, the lower ones long-stalked and often enormous, the leaflets' conspicuous veins apparently ending in the notches of the coarse, sharp teeth, help to distinguish it from its innocent relations sometimes confounded with it. Its several tuberiform fleshy roots contain an especially deadly poison; nevertheless, some highly intelligent animals, beavers, rabbits, and the omnivorous small boy among others have mistaken it for sweet-cicely with fatal results. Indeed, the potion drunk by Socrates and other philosophers and criminals at Athens, is thought to have been a decoction made from the roots of this very hemlock. Many little white flowers in each cluster make up a large umbel; and many umbels to a plant attract great numbers of flies, small bees, and wasps, which sip the freely exposed nectar apparently with only the happiest consequences, as they transfer pollen from the male to the proterandrous hermaphrodite flowers. Just as the cow-parsnip shows a preponderance of flies among its visitors, so the water hemlock seems to attract far more bees and wasps than any of the umbel-bearing carrot tribe. It blooms from the end of June through August.

Still another poisonous species is the HEMLOCK WATER-PARSNIP (Sium cicutaefolium), found in swampy places throughout Canada and the United States from ocean to ocean. The compound, long-rayed umbels of small white flowers, fringy-bracted below, which measure two or three inches across; the extremely variable pinnate leaves, which may be divided into from three to six pairs of narrow and sharply toothed leaflets (or perhaps the lower long-stalked ones as finely dissected as a wild carrot leaf where they grow in water), and the stout, grooved, branching stem, from two to six feet tall, are its distinguishing characteristics. In these umbels it will be noticed there are far more hermaphrodite, or two-sexed, florets (maturing their anthers first), than there are male ones; consequently quantities of unwelcome seed are set with the help of small bees, wasps, and flies, which receive generous entertainment from July to October.

The MOCK BISHOP'S-WEED (Ptilimnium capillaceum), a slender, delicate, dainty weed found chiefly in saltwater meadows from Massachusetts to Florida and around the Gulf coast to Texas, has very finely dissected, fringy leaves and compound umbels two to four inches across, of tiny white florets, with threadlike bracts below. It blooms throughout the summer.

FLOWERING DOGWOOD (Cornus florida) Dogwood family

Flowers - (Apparently) large, white or pinkish, the four conspicuous parts simulating petals, notched at the top, being really bracts of an involucre below the true flowers, clustered, in the center, which are very small, greenish yellow, 4-parted, perfect. Stem: A large shrub or small tree, wood hard, bark rough. Leaves: Opposite, oval, entire-edged, petioled, paler underneath. Fruit: Clusters of egg-shaped scarlet berries, tipped with the persistent calyx. Preferred Habitat - Woodlands rocky thickets, wooded roadsides. Flowering Season - April-June. Distribution - Maine to Florida, west to Ontario and Texas.

Has Nature's garden a more decorative ornament than the flowering dogwood, whose spreading flattened branches whiten the woodland borders in May as if an untimely snowstorm had come down upon them, and in autumn paint the landscape with glorious crimson, scarlet, and gold, dulled by comparison only with the clusters of vivid red berries among the foliage? Little wonder that nurserymen sell enormous numbers of these small trees to be planted on lawns. The horrors of pompous monuments, urns, busts, shafts, angels, lambs, and long-drawn-out eulogies in stone in many a cemetery are mercifully concealed in part by these boughs, laden with blossoms of heavenly purity.

"Let dead names be eternized in dead stone, But living names by living shafts be known. Plant thou a tree whose leaves shall sing Thy deeds and thee each fresh, recurrent spring."

Fit symbol of immortality! Even before the dogwood's leaves fall in autumn, the round buds for next year's bloom appear on the twigs, to remain in consoling evidence all winter with the scarlet fruit. When the buds begin to swell in spring, the four reddish-purple, scale-like bracts expand, revealing a dozen or more tiny green flowers clustered within for the large, white, petal-like parts, with notched, tinted, and puckered lips, into which these reddish bracts speedily develop, and which some of us have mistaken for a corolla, are not petals at all - not the true flowers - merely appendages around the real ones, placed there, like showy advertisements, to attract customers. Nectar, secreted in a disk on each minute ovary, is eagerly sought by little Andrena and other bees, besides flies and butterflies. Insects crawling about these clusters, whose florets are all of one kind, get their heads and undersides dusted with pollen, which they transfer as they suck. Hungry winter birds, which bolt the red fruit only when they can get no choicer fare, distribute the smooth, indigestible stones far and wide.

When the Massachusetts farmers think they hear the first brown thrasher in April advising them to plant their Indian corn, reassuringly calling, "Drop it, drop it - cover it up, cover it up - pull it up, pull it up, pull it up" (Thoreau), they look to the dogwood flowers to confirm the thrasher's advice before taking it.

The LOW or DWARF CORNEL, or BUNCHBERRY (C. canadensus) whose scaly stem does its best to attain a height of nine inches, bears a whorl of from four to six oval, pointed, smooth leaves at the summit. From the midst of this whorl comes a cluster of minute greenish florets, encircled by four to six large, showy, white petal-like bracts, quite like a small edition of the flowering dogwood blossom. Tight clusters of round berries, that are lifted upward on a gradually lengthened peduncle after the flowers fade (May-July), brighten with vivid touches of scarlet shadowy, mossy places in cool, rich woods, where the dwarf cornels, with the partridge vine, twin flower, gold thread, and fern, form the most charming of carpets.

Other common dogwoods there are - shrubs from three to ten feet in height - which bear flat clusters of small white flowers without the showy petal-like bracts, imitating a corolla, as in the two preceding species, but each little four-parted blossom attracting its miscellaneous crowd of benefactors by association with dozens of its counterparts in a showy cyme. Because these flowers expand farther than the minute florets of the dwarf cornel or the flowering dogwood, and the sweets are therefore more accessible, all the insects which fertilize them come to the shrub dogwoods too, and in addition very many beetles, to which their odor seems especially attractive. ("Odore carabico o scarabeo" - Delpino.) The ROUND-LEAVED CORNEL or DOGWOOD [now ROUNDLEAF DOGWOOD] (C. circinata), found on shady hillsides, in open woodlands, and roadside thickets - especially in rocky districts - from Nova Scotia to Virginia, and westward to Iowa, may be known by its greenish, warty twigs; its broadly ovate, or round petioled, opposite leaves, short-tapering to a point, and downy beneath; and, in May and June, by its small, flat, white flower-clusters about two inches across, that are followed by light-blue (not edible) berries.

Even more abundant is the SILKY CORNEL, KINNIKINNICK, or SWAMP DOGWOOD [now SILKY DOGWOOD] (C. amonum; C. sericca of Gray) found in low, wet ground, and beside streams, from Nebraska to the Atlantic Ocean, south to Florida and north to New Brunswick. Its dull-reddish twigs, oval or oblong leaves, rounded at the base but tapering to a point at the apex, and usually silky-downy with fine, brownish hairs underneath (to prevent the pores from clogging with vapors arising from its damp habitat); its rather compact, flat clusters of white flowers from May to July, and its bluish berries are its distinguishing features. The Indians loved to smoke its bark for its alleged tonic effect.

The RED-OSIER CORNEL or DOGWOOD (C. stolonifera), which has spread, with the help of running shoots, through the soft soil of its moist retreats, over the British Possessions north of us and throughout the United States from ocean to ocean, except at the extreme south, may be known by its bright purplish-red twigs; its opposite, slender, petioled leaves, rather abruptly pointed at the apex, roughish on both sides, but white or nearly so beneath; its small, flat-topped white flower-clusters in June or July; and finally, by its white or lead-colored fruit.

In good, rich, moist soil another white-fruited species, the PANICLED CORNEL or DOGWOOD (C. candidissima; C. paniculata of Gray) rears its much-branched, smooth, gray stems. In May or June the shrub is beautiful with numerous convex, loose clusters of white flowers at the ends of the twigs. So far do the stamens diverge from the pistil that self-pollination is not likely; but an especially large number of the less specialized insects, seeking the freely exposed nectar, do all the necessary work as they crawl about and fly from shrub to shrub. This species bears comparatively long and narrow leaves, pale underneath. Its range is from Maine to the Carolinas and westward to Nebraska.

WHITE ALDER; SWEET PEPPERBUSH; ALDER-LEAVED CLETHRA (Clethra alnifolia) White Alder family

Flowers - Very fragrant, white, about 1/3 in. across, borne in long, narrow, upright, clustered spikes, with awl-shaped bracts. Calyx of 5 sepals; 5 longer petals; 10 protruding stamens, the style longest. Stem: A much-branched shrub, 3 to 10 ft. high. Leaves: Alternate, oblong or ovate, finely saw-edged above the middle at least, green on both sides, tapering at base into short petioles. Preferred Habitat - Low, wet woodland and roadside thickets; swamps; beside slow streams; meadows. Flowering Season - July-August. Distribution - Chiefly near the coast, in States bordering the Atlantic Ocean.

Like many another neglected native plant, the beautiful sweet pepperbush improves under cultivation; and when the departed lilacs, syringa, snowball, and blossoming almond, found with almost monotonous frequency in every American garden, leave a blank in the shrubbery at midsummer, these fleecy white spikes should exhale their spicy breath about our homes. But wild flowers, like a prophet, may remain long without honor in their own country. This and a similar but more hairy species found in the Alleghany region, the MOUNTAIN SWEET PEPPERBUSH (C. acuminata), with pointed leaves, pale beneath, and spreading or drooping flower-spikes, go abroad to be appreciated. Planted beside lakes and streams on noblemen's estates, how overpowering must their fragrance be in the heavy, moisture-laden air of England! Even in our drier atmosphere, it hangs about the thickets like incense.

ROUND-LEAVED PYROLA; PEAR-LEAVED, or FALSE WINTERGREEN; INDIAN or CANKER LETTUCE (Pyrola rolundifolia) Wintergreen family

Flowers - Very fragrant, white, in a spike; 6 to 20, nodding from an erect, bracted scape 6 to 20 in. high. Calyx 5-parted corolla, over 1/2 in. across, of 5 concave, obtuse petals 10 stamens, protruding pistil, style curved, stigma 5-lobed. Leaves: All spreading from the base by margined petioles; shining leathery green, round or broadly oval, obtuse, 1 1/2 to 3 in. long, persistent through the winter. Preferred Habitat - Open woods. Flowering Season - June-July. Distribution - Nova Scotia to Georgia, west to Ohio and Minnesota.

Deliciously fragrant little flowers, nodding from an erect, slender stalk, when seen at a distance are often mistaken for lilies-of-the-valley growing wild. But closer inspection of the rounded, pearlike leaves in a cluster from the running root, and the concave, not bell-shaped, white, waxen blossoms, with the pistil protruding and curved, indicate the commonest of the pyrolas. Some of its kin dwell in bogs and wet places, but this plant and the shin-leaf carpet drier woodland where dwarf cornels, partridge vines, pipsissewa, and goldthread weave their charming patterns too. Certain of the lovely pyrola clan, whose blossoms range from greenish white, flesh-color, and pink to deep purplish rose, have so many features in common they were once counted mere varieties of this round-leaved wintergreen - an easygoing classification broken up by later-day systematists, who now rank the varieties as distinct species. It will be noticed that all these flowers have their anthers erect in the bud but reversed at flowering time, each of the two sacs opening by a pore which, in reality, is at the base of the sac, though by reversion it appears to be at the top. To these pores small bees and flies fasten their short lips to feed on pollen, some of which will be necessarily .jarred out on them as they struggle for a foothold on the stamens, and will be carried by them to another flower's protruding stigma, which impedes their entrance purposely to receive the imported pollen.

By reason of the old custom of clapping on a so-called "shinplaster" to every bruise, regardless of its location on the human body, a lovely little plant, whose leaves were once counted a first aid to the injured, still suffers instead under an unlovely name. The SHIN-LEAF (P. elliptica) sends up a naked flower-stalk, scaly at the base, often with a bract midway, and bearing at the top from seven to fifteen very fragrant, nodding, waxen, greenish-white blossoms, similar to the round-leaved wintergreen's. But on the thinner, dull, dark-green, upright leaves, with slight wavy indentations, scarcely to be called teeth, on the margins, their shorter leaf-stalks often reddish, one chiefly depends to name this common plant. It is usually found, in company with a few or many of its fellows, in rich woodlands so far west as the Rocky Mountains, blooming from June to August, according to the climate of its wide range.

When the little SERRATED or ONE-SIDED WINTERGREEN (P. secunda) first sends up its slender raceme in June or July, it is erect but presently the small, greenish-white flowers, opening irregularly along one side, appear to weigh it downward into a curve. Usually several bracted scapes rise from a running, branched rootstock, to a height of from three to (rarely) ten inches above a cluster of basal evergreen leaves. These latter are rather thin, oval, slightly pointed, wavy or slightly saw-edged, the midrib prominent above and below. A peculiarity of the flowers is, that their petals are partially welded together into little bells, with the clapper (alias the straight green pistil) protruding, and the stamens united around its base. After the blossoms have been fertilized, the tiny, round, five-scalloped seed capsules, with the pistil still protruding, remain in evidence for months, as is usual in the pyrola clan. Small as the plant is, it has managed to distribute itself over Europe, Asia, and the woods and thickets of our own land from Labrador to Alaska, southward to California, Mexico, and the District of Columbia.

Another little globe-trotter, so insignificant in size that one is apt to overlook it until its surprisingly large blossom appears in June or July, is the ONE-FLOWERED WINTERGREEN (Moneses uniflora), found in cool northern woods, especially about the roots of pines, in such yielding soil as will enable its long stem to run just below the surface. ONE-FLOWERED PYROLA, it is often called, although it belongs to a genus all its own. A boldly curved stalk, like a miniature Bo-peep crook, enables the solitary white or pink widely open flower to droop from the tip, thus protecting its precious contents from rain, and from crawling pilferers, to whom a pendent blossom is as inaccessible as a hanging bird's nest is to snakes. This five-petalled waxen flower, half an inch across or over, with its ten white, yellow-tipped stamens, and green, club-shaped pistil projecting from a conspicuous round ovary, never nods more than six inches above the ground, often at only half that height. When there is no longer need for the stalk to crook, that is to say, after the flower has begun to fruit, it gradually straightens itself out so that the little seed capsule, with the style and its five-lobed stigma still persistent, is held erect. The thin, rounded, finely notched leaves, measuring barely an inch in length, are clustered in whorls next the ground. Whether one comes upon colonies of this gregarious little plant, or upon a lonely straggler, the "single delight" (moneses), as Dr. Gray called the solitary flower, is one of the joys of a tramp through the summer woods.

INDIAN PIPE; ICE-PLANT; GHOST-FLOWER; CORPSE-PLANT (Monotropa uniflora) Indian-pipe family

Flowers - Solitary, smooth, waxy, white (rarely pink), oblong-bell shaped, nodding from the tip of a fleshy, white, scaly scape 4 to 10 in. tall. Calyx of 2 to 4 early-falling white sepals; 4 or 5 oblong, scale-like petals; 8 or 10 tawny, hairy stamens; a 5-celled, egg-shaped ovary, narrowed into the short, thick style. Leaves: None. Roots: A mass of brittle fibers, from which usually a cluster of several white scapes arises. Fruit: A 5-valved, many-seeded, erect capsule. Preferred Habitat - Heavily shaded, moist, rich woods, especially under oak and pine trees. Flowering Season - June-August. Distribution - Almost throughout temperate North America.

Colorless in every part, waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes rise like a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them well. Ghoulish parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted roots prey either on the juices of living plants or on the decaying matter of dead ones, how weirdly beautiful and decorative, they are! The strange plant grows also in Japan, and one can readily imagine how fascinated the native artists must be by its chaste charms.

Yet to one who can read the faces of flowers, as it were, it stands a branded sinner. Doubtless its ancestors were industrious, honest creatures, seeking their food in the soil, and digesting it with the help of leaves filled with good green matter (chlorophyll) on which virtuous vegetable life depends; but some ancestral knave elected to live by piracy, to drain the already digested food of its neighbors; so the Indian pipe gradually lost the use of parts for which it had need no longer, until we find it today without color and its leaves degenerated into mere scaly bracts. Nature has manifold ways of illustrating the parable of the ten pieces of money. Spiritual law is natural law: "From him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away." Among plants as among souls, there are all degrees of backsliders. The foxglove, which is guilty of only sly, petty larceny, wears not the equivalent of the striped suit and the shaved head; nor does the mistletoe, which steals crude food from the tree, but still digests it itself, and is therefore only a dingy yellowish green. Such plants, however, as the broomrape, pinesap, beechdrops, the Indian pipe, and the dodder - which marks the lowest stage of degradation of them all - appear among their race branded with the mark of crime as surely as was Cain.

No wonder this degenerate hangs its head; no wonder it grows black with shame on being picked, as if its wickedness were only just then discovered! To think that a plant related on one side to many of the loveliest flowers in Nature's garden- - the azaleas, laurels, rhododendrons, and the bonny heather - and on the other side to the modest but no less charming wintergreen tribe, should have fallen from grace to such a depth! Its scientific name, meaning a flower once turned, describes it during only a part of its career. When the minute, innumerable seeds begin to form, it proudly raises its head erect, as if conscious that it had performed the one righteous act of its life.

LABRADOR TEA (Ledum Groenlandicum; L. latifolium of Gray) Heath family

Flowers - White, 5-parted, 1/2 in. across or less, numerous, borne in terminal, umbellate clusters rising from scaly, sticky bud-bracts. Stem: A compact shrub 1 to 4 ft. high, resinous, the twigs woolly-hairy. Leaves: Alternate, thick, evergreen, oblong, obtuse, small, dull above, rusty-woolly beneath, the margins curled. Preferred Habitat - Swamps, bogs, wet mountain woods. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Greenland to Pennsylvania, west to Wisconsin.

Whoever has used the homeopathic lotion distilled from the leaves of Ledum palustre, a similar species found at the far North, knows the tea-like fragrance given forth by the leaves of this common shrub when crushed in a warm hand. But because the homeopathists claim that like is cured by like, are we to assume that these little bushes, both of which afford a soothing lotion, also irritate and poison? It may be; for they are next of kin to the azaleas, laurels, and rhododendrons, known to be injurious since Xenophon's day. At the end of May, when the Labrador tea is white with abundant flower clusters, one cannot but wonder why so desirable an acquisition is never seen in men's gardens here among its relatives. Over a hundred years ago the dense, compact little shrub was taken to England to adorn sunny bog gardens on fine estates. Doubtless the leaves have woolly mats underneath for the reason given in reference to the Steeple-bush.

WILD ROSEMARY; MARCH HOLY ROSE; WATER ANDROMEDA; MOORWORT (Andromeda Polifolia) Heath family

Flowers - White or pink-tinted, small, round, tubular, 5-toothed at the tip; drooping from curved footstalks in few-flowered terminal umbels. Calyx deeply 5-parted; 10 bearded stamens; style like a column. Stem: A sparingly branched, dwarf shrub, 6 in. to 3 ft. tall. Leaves: Linear to lance-shape, evergreen, dark and glossy above, with a prominent white bloom underneath, the margins curled. Preferred Habitat - Cool bogs, wet places. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Pennsylvania and Michigan, far northward.

Only a delightfully imaginative optimist like Linnaeus could feel the enthusiasm he expended on this dwarf shrub, with its little, white, heath-like flowers, which most of us consider rather insignificant, if the truth be told. But then the blossoms he found in Lapland must have been much pinker than any seen in American swamps, since they reminded him of "a fine female complexion."

"This plant is always fixed on some little turfy hillock in the midst of the swamps," he wrote, "just as Andromeda herself was chained to a rock in the sea, which bathed her feet as the fresh water does the roots of this plant.... As the distressed virgin cast down her blushing face through excessive affliction, so does this rosy-colored flower hang its head, growing paler and paler till it withers away." Under the old go-as-you-please method of applying scientific names, most of this shrub's relatives shared with it the name of the fair maid whom Perseus rescued from the dragons.

The beautiful, low-growing STAGGERBUSH (Pieris Mariana) has its small, cylindric, five-parted, white or pink-tinted flowers clustered at intervals along one side of the upright, nearly leafless, smooth, dark-dotted branches of the preceding year. When the glossy oval leaves, black dotted beneath, are freshly put forth in early summer - for the shrub is not strictly an evergreen, however late the old leaves may cling - it is said that stupid sheep and calves, which find them irresistibly attractive, stagger about from their poisonous effect just as they do after feeding on this shrub's relative the Lambkill (q.v.). In sandy soil from southern New England to Florida, rarely far inland, one finds the staggerbush in bloom from May to July. On the dry plains of Long Island, where it is common indeed, it appears a not unworthy relative of the FETTERBUSH (Pieris fioribunda), that exquisite little evergreen with quantities of small white urns drooping along its twigs, which nurserymen acquire from the mountains of our Southern States to adorn garden shrubbery at home and abroad. Mr. William Robinson, in his delightful book, "The English Flower Garden" (a book, by the way, that Rudyard Kipling reads as the Puritan read his Bible), counts this fetterbush among the "indispensables."

Much taller than the preceding dwarfs is the COMMON PRIVET ANDROMEDA found in swamps and low ground from New England to the Gulf and in the southwest (Xolisma ligustrina). Whoever has seen the privet almost universally grown in hedges is familiar with the general aspect of this much-branched shrub. Most farmers' boys know the Andromeda's mock May-apple, a hollow, stringy growth of insect origin, which they are not likely to confuse with the pulpy, juicy apple found on the closely related azaleas (q.v.). Abundant terminal spike-like or branched clusters of white, globular, four or five parted flowers in close array, attract quantities of bees from the end of May to early July, notwithstanding each individual flower measures barely an eighth of an inch across. We have seen the fine hair-triggers which other members of this same family, the beautiful pink laurels (q.v.), have set to be sprung by an incoming visitor. Now this Andromeda, and similarly several of its immediate kin, have a quite different, but equally effective, method of throwing pollen on its friends who come to call. When one of the little banded bees clings, as he must, to the tiny flower scarce half his size, thrusting his tongue obliquely through the globe's narrow opening to reach the nectar, suddenly a shower of pollen is inhospitably thrown upon him from within. In probing between the ring of anthers (that are pressed against the style by the S-shaped curvature of the filaments so as to retain the pollen), he needs must displace some of them and release the vitalizing dust through the large terminal pores in the anther-sacs. Is he discouraged by such rough treatment? Not at all. Off he flies to another Andromeda blossom, and leaves some of the dust with which he is powdered on the sticky stigma that impedes his entrance, before precipitating a fresh shower as he sips another reward. The straight column-like pistil, stigmatic on its tip only, allows the flower's own pollen to slide harmlessly down its sides. How exquisite are the most minute adjustments of floral mechanism! Is it possible for one to remain an agnostic after the evidences even the flowers show us of infinite wisdom and love?

Another denizen of swamps and low ground, next of kin to the trailing arbutus, is the LEATHERLEAF, or DWARF CASSANDRA (Chamaedaphne calyculata), a modest little shrub, its stiff, slender branches plentifully set with thick oblong leaves that grow gradually smaller the higher they go, and when young are densely covered with minute scurfy scales. Sometimes before the snow has melted in April, the leafy terminal shoots are hung with multitudes of little waxy-white, cylindric, typical heath flowers only about a quarter of an inch long, each nodding from a leaf axil, and the whole forming one-sided racemes. But as the shrub ranges from Newfoundland to Georgia, and westward to Illinois, British Columbia, and Alaska, some people find it blooming even in July. Mythological names were evidently in high favor among the botanists who labeled the genuses comprising the heath family: Phyllodoce, the sea-nymph; Cassiope, mother of Andromeda; Leucothoe; Andromeda herself; Pieris, a name sometimes applied to the Muses from their supposed abode at Pieria, Thessaly; and Cassandra, daughter of Priam, the prophetess who was shut up in a mad-house because she prophesied the ruin of Troy - these names are as familiar to the student of this group of shrubs today as they were to the devout Greeks in the brave days of old.

CREEPING WINTERGREEN; CHECKERBERRY; PARTRIDGE-BERRY; MOUNTAIN TEA; GROUND TEA; DEER, BOX, or SPICE BERRY (Gaultheria procumbens) Heath family

Flowers - White, small, usually solitary, nodding from a leaf axil. Corolla rounded bell-shape, 5-toothed; calyx 5-parted, persistent; 10 included stamens, their anther-sacs opening by a pore at the top. Stem: Creeping above or below ground, its branches 2 to 6 in. high. Leaves: Mostly clustered at top of branches; alternate, glossy, leathery, evergreen, much darker above than underneath, oval to oblong, very finely saw-edged; the entire plant aromatic. Fruit: Bright red, mealy, spicy, berry-like; ripe in October. Preferred Habitat - Cool woods, especially under evergreens. Flowering Season - June-September. Distribution - Newfoundland to Georgia, westward to Michigan and Manitoba.

However truly the poets may make us feel the spirit of Nature in their verse, can many be trusted when it comes to the letter of natural science? "Where camels arch their cool, dark boughs o'er beds of wintergreen," wrote Bryant; yet it is safe to say that nine colonies of this hardy little plant out of every ten he saw were under evergreen trees, not dogwoods. When the July sun melts the fragrance out of the pines high overhead, and the dim, cool forest aisles are more fragrant with commingled incense from a hundred natural censers than any stone cathedral's, the wintergreen's little waxy bells hang among the glossy leaves that form their aromatic carpet. On such a day, in such a resting place, how one thrills with the consciousness that it is good to be alive!

Omnivorous children who are addicted to birch-chewing, prefer these tender yellow-green leaves tinged with red, when newly put forth in June - "Youngsters" rural New Englanders call them then. In some sections a kind of tea is steeped from the leaves, which also furnish the old-fashioned embrocation, wintergreen oil. Late in the year the glossy bronze carpet of old leaves dotted over with vivid red "berries" invites much trampling by hungry birds and beasts, especially deer and bears, not to mention well-fed humans. Coveys of Bob Whites and packs of grouse will plunge beneath the snow for fare so delicious as this spicy, mealy fruit that hangs on the plant till spring, of course for the benefit of just such colonizing agents as they. Quite a different species, belonging to another family, bears the true Partridgeberry, albeit the wintergreen shares with it a number of popular names. In a strict sense neither of these plants produces a berry; for the fruit of the true partridge[berry] vine (Mitchella repens) is a double drupe, or stone bearer, each half containing four hard, seed-like nutlets; while the wintergreen's so called berry is merely the calyx grown thick, fleshy, and gaily colored - only a coating for the five-celled ovary that contains the minute seeds. Little baskets of wintergreen berries bring none too high prices in the fancy fruit and grocery shops when we calculate how many charming plants such unnatural use of them sacrifices.

Closely allied to the wintergreen is the RED BEARBERRY, KINNIKINIC, BEAR'S GRAPE, FOXBERRY or MEALBERRY, as it is variously called (Arctostaphylos-uva-ursi = bearberry). Trailing its spreading branches over sandy ground, rocky hillsides and steeps until it sometimes forms luxuriant mats, it closely resembles its cousin the arbutus in its manner of growth, and has been mistaken for it by at least one poet. But its tiny, rounded, urn-shaped flowers, which come in May and June, are white, not salver form and pink; the entire plant is not rusty-hairy; the dark little leathery evergreen leaves are spatulate, and, moreover, it bears small but abundant clusters of round, berry-like fruit, an attainment the arbutus still struggles for, but cannot yet reach. Bumblebees are the flower's chief benefactors. Game fowl, especially grouse, but many other birds too, and various animals which are glad to add the clusters of smooth red bearberries to their scanty winter menu, however insipid and dry they may be, have distributed the seed from Labrador across Arctic America to Alaska, southward to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nebraska, and California. How plants do compel insects, birds, and beasts to work for them! The entire plant is astringent, and has been used in medicine; also by leather dressers.

BLACK or HIGH-BUSH HUCKLEBERRY; WHORTLEBERRY [now TALL HUCKLEBERRY] (Gaylussacia resinosa) Huckleberry family

Flowers - White and pink, pale or deep, small, cylindric, bell-shaped. 5-parted, borne in 1-sided racemes from the sides of the stiff, grayish branches. Stem: A shrub to 3 ft. high. Leaves: Alternate, oval to oblong, firm, entire edged, green on both sides, dotted underneath with resinous spots, especially when young. Fruit: A round, black, bloomless, sweet, berry-like drupe, containing 10 seed-like nutlets, in each of which is a solitary seed. Ripe, July-August. Preferred Habitat - Moist, sandy soil, thickets, open woods. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - Newfoundland to Georgia, west to Manitoba and Kentucky.

This common huckleberry, oftener found in pies and muffins by the average observer than in its native thickets, unfortunately ripens in fly-time, when the squeamish boarder in the summer hotel does well to carefully scrutinize each mouthful. For the abundant fruit set on huckleberry bushes, as on so many others, we are indebted chiefly to the lesser bees, which, receiving the pollen jarred out from the terminal chinks in the anther-sacs on their undersides as they cling, transfer it to the protruding stigmas of the next blossom visited. After fertilization, when the now useless corolla falls, the ten-celled ovary is protected by the encircling calyx, that grows rapidly, swells, fills with juice, and takes on color until it and the ovary together become a so-called berry, whose seeds are dropped far and wide by birds and beasts. "The name huckleberry, which is applied indiscriminately to several species of Vaccinium and Gaylussacia," says Professor L. H. Bailey, "is evidently a corruption of whortleberry. Whortleberry is in turn a corruption of myrtleberry. In the Middle Ages, the true myrtleberry was largely used in cookery and medicine, but the European bilberry or Vaccinium so closely resembled it that the name was transferred to the latter plant, a circumstance commemorated by Linnaeus in the giving of the name Vaccinium Myrtillus to the bilberry. From the European whortleberry the name was transferred to the similar American plants."

A common little bushy shrub, not a true blueberry, found in moist woods, especially beside streams, from New England to the Gulf States, and westward to Ohio, is the BLUE TANGLE, TANGLEBERRY, or DANGLEBERRY [now TALL HUCKLEBERRY (G. frondosa). It bears a few tiny greenish-pink flowers dangling from pedicels in loose racemes, and corresponding clusters of most delicious, sweet, dark-blue berries, covered with hoary bloom in midsummer. The abundant resinous leaves on its slender gray branches are pale and hoary beneath. The caterpillars of several species of sulphur butterflies (Colias) feed on huckleberry leaves.

To a genus quite distinct from the huckleberries belong the true blueberries, however interchangeably these names are misused. Perhaps the first species to send its fruit to market in June and July is the DWARF, SUGAR, or LOW-BUSH BLUEBERRY (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum), sometimes six inches tall, never more than twenty inches. It prefers sandy or rocky soil from southern New Jersey far northward, and west to Illinois. Shortly after the small, bell-shaped, white or pink flowers, that grow in racemes on the ends or sides of the angular, green, warty branches of nearly all blueberry bushes, have been fertilized by bees, this species forms an especially sweet berry with a bloom on its blue surface. The alternate oblong leaves, smooth and green on both sides, are very finely and sharply saw-edged.

Another, and perhaps the commonest, as it is the finest, species, whose immature fruit is still green or red when the dwarf's is ripe, is the HIGH-BUSH, TALL, or SWAMP BLUEBERRY (V. corymbosum), found in low wet ground from Virginia westward to the Mississippi, and very far north. Only the bees and their kind concern themselves with the little cylindric, five-parted, nectar-bearing flowers. These appear with the oblong, entire leaves, paler below than above. But thousands of fruit sellers and housekeepers depend on the sweet blueberries (with a pleasant acid flavor) as a market staple. In July and August, even in early September, the berries arrive in the cities. One picker in New Jersey claims to have filled an entire crate with the fruit of a single bush.

The DEERBERRY, BUCKBERRY, or SQUAW HUCKLEBERRY (V. stainineum), common in dry woods and thickets from Maine and Minnesota to the Gulf States, puts forth quantities of small greenish-white, yellow, or purplish-green, open bell-shaped, five-cleft flowers, nodding from hair-like pedicels in graceful, leafy-bracted racemes. Both the tips of the stamens and the style protrude like a fringe. No creature, unless hard pressed by hunger, could relish the greenish or yellowish berries. This is a low-growing, spreading shrub, with firm oval or oblong tapering leaves, dull above, and pale, sometimes even hoary, underneath.

CREEPING SNOWBERRY (Chiogenes hispidula) Huckleberry family

Flowers - Very small, white, few, solitary, nodding on short, curved peduncles from the leaf axils. Calyx 2-bracted, 4-cleft; corolla a short 4-cleft bell; 8 short stamens, each anther sac opening by a slit to the middle; 1 pistil, the ovary 4-celled. Stem: Creeping along the ground, the slender, leafy, hairy branches 3 to 12 in. long. Leaves: Evergreen, alternate, 2-ranked, oval, very small, dark and glossy above, coated with stiff, rusty hairs underneath, the edges curled. Fruit: A snow-white, round or oval, mealy, aromatic berry; ripe August-September. Preferred Habitat - Cool bogs; low, moist, mossy woods. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - North Carolina and Michigan northward to the British Possessions.

Allied on the one hand to the cranberry, so often found with it in the cool northern peat bogs, and on the other to the delicious blueberries, this "snow-born" berry, which appears on no dining table, nevertheless furnishes many a good meal to hungry birds and fagged pedestrians. Both the pretty foliage and the fruit have the refreshing flavor of sweet birch.

PYXIE; FLOWERING MOSS; PINE-BARREN BEAUTY (Pyxidanthera barbulata) Diapensia family

Flowers - Abundant, white, or sometimes pink, about 1/4 in. across, 5-parted, solitary, seated at tips of branches. Stem: Prostrate, creeping, much branched, the main branches often 1 ft. long, very leafy, growing in mat-like patches. Leaves: Moss-like, very narrow, pointed, seated on stem, and overlapping like scales, on upper part of branches. Preferred Habitat - Dry sandy soil; pine barrens. Flowering Season - March-May. Distribution - New Jersey, south to North Carolina.

Curiously enough, this creeping, tufted, mat-like little plant is botanically known as a shrub, yet it is lower than many mosses, and would seem to the untrained eye to be certainly of their kin. In earliest spring, when Lenten penitents, jaded with the winter's frivolities in the large cities, seek the salubrious pine lands of southern New Jersey and beyond, they are amazed and delighted to find the abundant little evergreen mounds of pyxie already starred with blossoms. The dense mossy cushions, plentifully sprinkled with pink buds and white flowers, are so beautiful, one cannot resist taking a few tuffets home to naturalize in the rock garden. Planted in a mixture of clear sand and leaf-mould, with exposure to the morning sun, pyxie will smile up at us from under our very windows, spring after spring, with increased charms; whereas the arbutus, that untamable wildling, carried home from the pinewoods at the same time, soon sulks itself to death.

STARFLOWER; CHICKWEED-WINTERGREEN; STAR ANEMONE (Trientalis Americana) Primrose family

Flowers - White, solitary, or a few rising on slender, wiry foot-stalks above a whorl of leaves. Calyx of 5 to 9 (usually 7) narrow sepals. Corolla wheel-shaped, 1/2 in. across or less, deeply cut into (usually) 7 tapering, spreading, petal-like segments. Stem: A long horizontal rootstock, sending up smooth stem-like branches 3 to 9 in. high, usually with a scale or two below. (Trientalis = one-third of a foot, the usual height of a plant.) Leaves: 5 to 10, in a whorl at summit; thin, tapering at both ends, of unequal size, 1 1/2 to 4 in. long. Preferred Habitat - Moist shade of woods and thickets. Flowering Season - May-June. Distribution - From Virginia and Illinois far north.

Is any other blossom poised quite so airily above its whorl of leaves as the delicate, frosty-white little starflower? It is none of the anemone kin, of course, in spite of one of its misleading folk names; but only the wind-flower has a similar lightness and grace. No nectar rewards the small bee and fly visitors; they get pollen only. Those coming from older blossoms to a newly opened one leave some of the vitalizing dust clinging to them on the moist and sticky stigma, which will wither to prevent self-fertilization before the flower's own curved anthers mature and shed their grains. Sometimes, when the blossoms do not run on schedule time, or the insects are not flying in stormy weather, this well laid plan may gang a-gley. An occasional lapse matters little; it is perpetual self-fertilization that Nature abhors.

INDIAN HEMP: AMY-ROOT (Apocynum cannabinum) Dogbane family

Flowers - Greenish white, about 1/4 in. across, on short pedicels, in dense clusters at ends of branches and from the axils. Calyx of 5 segments; corolla nearly erect, bell-shaped, 5-lobed, with 5 small triangular appendages alternating with the stamens within its tube. Stem: 1 to 4 ft. high, branching, smooth, often dull reddish, from a deep, vertical root. Leaves: Opposite, entire, 2 to 6 in. long, mostly oblong, abruptly pointed, variable. Fruit: A pair of slender pods, the numerous seeds tipped with tufts of hairs. Preferred Habitat - Gravelly soil, banks of streams, low fields. Flowering Season - June-August. Distribution - Almost throughout the United States and British Possessions.

Instead of setting a trap to catch flies and hold them by the tongue in a vise-like grip until death alone releases them, as its heartless sister the spreading dogbane does (q.v.), this awkward, rank herb lifts clusters of smaller, less conspicuous, but innocent, flowers, with nectar secreted in rather shallow receptacles, that even short-tongued insects may feast without harm. Honey and mining bees, among others; wasps and flies in variety, and great numbers of the spangled fritillary (Argynnis cybele) and the banded hair-streak (Thecla calanus) among the butterfly tribe; destructive bugs and beetles attracted by the white color, a faint odor, and liberal entertainment, may be seen about the clusters. Many visitors are useless pilferers, no doubt; but certainly the bees which depart with pollen masses cemented to their lips or tongues, to leave them in the stigmatic cavities of the next blossoms their heads enter, pay a fair price for all they get.

>From the fact that Indians used to substitute this very common plant's tough fiber for hemp in making their fishnets, mats, baskets, and clothing, came its popular name; and from their use of the juices to poison mangy old dogs about their camps, its scientific one.

WHORLED or GREEN-FLOWERED MILKWEED (Asclepias verticillata) Milkweed family

Flowers - White or greenish, on short pedicels, in several small terminal clusters. Calyx inferior; corolla deeply 5-parted, the oblong segments turned back; a 5-parted, erect crown of hooded nectaries between them and the stamens, each shorter than the incurved horn within. Stem: 1 to 2 1/2 ft. tall, simple or sparingly branched, hairy, leafy to summit, containing milky juice. Leaves: In upright groups, very narrow, almost thread-like, from 3 to 7 in each whorl. Fruit: 2 smooth, narrow, spindle-shaped, upright pods, the seeds attached to silky fluff; 1 pod usually abortive. Preferred Habitat - Dry fields, hills, uplands. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - Maine and far westward, south to Florida and Mexico.

In describing the common milkweed (q.v.), so many statements were made that apply quite as truly to this far daintier and more ethereal species, the reader is referred back to the pink and magenta section. Compared with some of its rank-growing, heavy relatives, how exquisite is this little denizen of the uplands, with its whorls of needle-like leaves set at intervals along a slender swaying stem! The entire plant, with its delicate foliage and greenish-white umbels of flowers, rather suggests a member of the carrot tribe; and much the same class of small-sized, short-tongued visitors come to seek its accessible nectar as we find about the parsnips, for example. When little bees alight - and these are the truest benefactors, however frequently larger bees, wasps, flies, and even the almost useless butterflies come around - their feet slip about within the low crown to find a secure lodging. As they rise to fly away after sucking, the pollen masses which have attached themselves to the hairs on the lower part of their legs are drawn out, to be transferred to other blossoms, perhaps today, perhaps not for a fortnight. Annoying as they may be, it is very rarely, indeed, that an insect can rid itself of the pollen masses carried from either orchids or milkweeds, except by the method Nature intended; and it is not until the long-suffering bee is outrageously loaded that he attains his greatest usefulness to milkweed blossoms. "Of ninety-two specimens bearing corpuscula of Asclepias verticillata," says Professor Robertson, "eighty-eight have them on hairs alone, and four on the hairs and claws." And again: "As far as the mere application of pollen to an insect is concerned, a flower with loose pollen has the advantage. But the advantage is on the side of Asclepias after the insect is loaded with it. It is only a general rule that insects keep to flowers of a particular species on their honey and pollen gathering expeditions. If a bee dusted with loose pollen visits flowers of another species, it will not long retain pollen in sufficient quantity to effectually fertilize flowers of the original species. On the other hand, if an insect returns at any time during the day, or even after a few days, to the species of Asclepias from which it got a load of pollinia, it may bring with it all or most of the pollinia which it has carried from the first plants visited. The firmness with which the pollinia keep their hold on the insect is one of the best adaptations for cross-fertilization."

Ants, the worst pilferers of nectar extant, find the hairy stem of the whorled milkweed, as well as its sticky juice, most discouraging, if not fatal, obstacles to climbing. How daintily the goldfinch picks at the milkweed pods and sets adrift the seeds attached to silky aeronautic fluff!

WILD POTATO-VINE; MAN-OF-THE-EARTH; MECHA-MECK (Ipomoea pandurata) Morning-glory family

Flowers - Funnel form, wide-spread, 2 to 3 in. long, pure white or pinkish purple inside the throat; the peduncles 1 to 5 flowered. Stem: Trailing over the ground or weakly twining, 2 to 12 ft. long. Leaves: Heart, fiddle, or halbert shaped (rarely 3-lobed), on slender petioles. Root: Enormous, fleshy. Preferred Habitat - Dry soil, sandy or gravelly fields or hills. Flowering Season - May-September. Distribution - Ontario, Michigan, and Texas, east to the Atlantic Ocean.

No one need be told that this flaring, trumpet-shaped flower is next of kin to the morning-glory that clambers over the trellises of countless kitchen porches, and escapes back to Nature's garden whenever it can. When the ancestors of these blossoms welded their five petals into a solid deep bell, which still shows on its edges the trace of five once separate parts, they did much to protect their precious contents from rain; but some additional protection was surely needed against the little interlopers not adapted to fertilize the flower, which could so easily crawl down its tube. Doubtless the hairs on the base of the filaments, between which certain bumblebees and other long-tongued benefactors can easily penetrate to suck the nectar secreted in a fleshy disk below, act as a stockade to little would-be pilferers. The color in the throat serves as a pathfinder to the deep-hidden sweets. How pleasant the way is made for such insects as a flower must needs encourage! For these the perennial wild potato vine keeps open house far later in the day than its annual relatives. Professor Robertson says it is dependent mainly upon two bees, Entechnia taurea and Xenoglossa ipomoeae, the latter its namesake.

One has to dig deep to find the huge, fleshy, potato-like root from which the vine derived its name of man-of-the-earth. Such a storehouse of juices is surely necessary in the dry soil where the wild potato lives.

Happily, the COMMON MORNING-GLORY (I. purpurea) - the Convolvulus major of seedsmen's catalogues - has so commonly escaped from cultivation in the eastern half of the United States and Canada as now to deserve counting among our wild flowers, albeit South America is its true home. Surely no description of this commonest of all garden climbers is needed; everyone has an opportunity to watch how the bees cross-fertilize it.

The vine has a special interest because of Darwin's illuminating experiments upon it when he planted six self-fertilized seeds and six seeds fertilized with the pollen brought from flowers on a different vine, on opposite sides of the same pot. Vines produced by the former reached an average height of five feet four inches, whereas the cross-pollenized seed sent its stems up two feet higher, and produced very many more flowers. If so marked a benefit from imported pollen may be observed in a single generation, is it any wonder that ambitious plants employ every sort of ingenious device to compel insects to bring them pollen from distant flowers of the same species? How punctually the MOON-FLOWER (I. grandiflora), next of kin to the morning-glory, opens its immense, pure white, sweet-scented flowers at night to attract night-flying moths, because their long tongues, which only can drain the nectar, may not be withdrawn until they are dusted with vitalizing powder for export to some waiting sister.