Maple Seed, with pair of wingsMaple Seed, with pair of wings
A plant may diligently find food and drink, pour forth delicious nectar, array itself with flowers as gayly as it can, and still behold its work unfinished. Its seed may be producedin plenty, and although as far as that goes it is well, it is not enough. Of what avail is all this seed if it falls as it ripens upon soil already overcrowded with its kind? Hence the vigorous emigration policy to be observed in plants of every name. Hence the fluffy sails set to catch the passing breeze by the dandelion, the thistle and by many more, including the southern plant of snowy wealth whose wings are cotton. With the same intent of seeking new fields are the hooks of the burdock, the unicorn plant, and the bur-parsley which impress as carriers the sheep and cattle upon a thousand hills. The Touch-me-not and the herb Robert adopt a different plan, and convert their seed-cases into pistols for the firing of seeds at as wide range as twenty feet or more. The maple, the ash, the hornbeam, the elm and the birch have yet another method of escape from the home acre. Their seeds are winged, and torn off in a gale are frequently borne two hundred yards away. And stronger wings than these are plied in the cherry tree'sservice. The birds bide the time when a blush upon the fruit betrays its ripeness. Then the cherries are greedily devoured, and their seed, preserved from digestion in their stony cases are borne over hill, dale, and river to some islet or brookside where a sprouting cherry plant will be free from the stifling rivalries suffered by its parent. Yoked in harness with sheep, ox, and bird as planter is yonder nimble squirrel. We need not begrudge him the store of nuts he hides. He will forget some of them, he will be prevented by fright or frost from nibbling yet more, and so without intending it he will ensure for others and himself a sure succession of acorns and butternuts.
Very singular are the seeds that have come to resemble beetles; among these may be mentioned the seeds of the castor-oil plant and of theIatropha. The pod of theBiserrulalooks like a worm, and a worm half-coiled might well have served as a model for the mimicry of theScorpiurus vermiculata. All these are much more likely to enlist the services of birds than if their resemblances to insects were less striking.
Nature elsewhere rich in hints to the gardener and the farmer is not silent here. A lesson plainly taught in all this apparatus for the dispersal of seeds is that the more various the planting the fuller the harvest. Now that from the wheat fields comes a cry of disappearing gains, it is time to heed the story told in the unbroken prairie that diversity in sowing means wealth in reaping.
In a field of growing flax we can find—somewhat oftener than the farmer likes—a curious tribe of plants, the dodders. Their stems are thin and wiry, and their small white flowers, globular in shape, make the azure blossoms of the flax all the lovelier by contrast. As their cousins the morning glories are to this day, the dodders in their first estate were true climbers. Even now they begin life in an honest kind of way with roots of their own that go forth as roots should, seeking food where it is to be found in the soil. But if we pull up one of these little club-shaped roots we shall see that it has gone to work feebly and doubtfully; it seems to have a skulking expectation of dinner without having to dig and delve for it in the rough dirty ground. Nor is this expectation unfounded. Watch the stem of a sister dodder as it rises from the earth day by day, and it will be observed to clasp a stalk of flax very tightly; so tightly that its suckers will absorb the juices of its unhappy host. When, so very easily, it can regale itself with food ready to hand why should it take the trouble to drudge for a living?
Like many another pauper demoralized by being fed in idleness, the plant now abandons honest toil, its roots from lack of exercise wither away, and for good and all it ceases to claim any independence whatever. Indeed, so deep is the dodder's degradation that if it cannot find a stem of flax, or hop, or other plant whereon to climb and thrive, it will simply shrivel and die ratherthan resume habits of industry so long renounced as to be at last forgotten.
Like the lowly dodder the mistletoe is a climber that has discovered large opportunities of theft in ascending the stem of a supporting plant. On this continent the mistletoe scales a wide variety of trees and shrubs, preferring poplars and apple trees, where these are to be had. Its extremely slender stem, its meagre leaves, its small flowers, greenish and leathery, are all eloquent as to the loss of strength and beauty inevitable to a parasite. Rising as this singular plant does out of the branches of another with a distinct life all its own, it is no other than a natural graft, and it is very probable that from the hint it so unmistakably gives the first gardeners were not slow to adopt grafts artificial—among the resources which have most enriched and diversified both flowers and fruits. The dodders and mistletoes rob juices from the stem and branches of their unfortunate hosts; more numerous still are the unbidden guests that fasten themselves upon the roots of their prey. The broom-rape, a comparatively recent immigrant from Europe, lays hold of the roots of thyme in preference to other place of entertainment; the Yellow Rattle, the Lousewort, and many more attach themselves to the roots of grasses—frequently with a serious curtailment of crop.
Yet in this very department of hers Nature has for ages hidden away what has been disclosedwithin twenty years as one of her least suspected marvels. It is no other than that certain parasites of field and meadow so far from being hurtful, are well worth cultivating for the good they do. For a long time the men who devoted themselves to the study of peas, beans, clovers, and other plants of the pulse family, were confronted with a riddle they could not solve. These plants all manage to enrich themselves with compounds of nitrogen, which make them particularly valuable as food, and these compounds often exist in a degree far exceeding the rate at which their nitrogen comes out of the soil. And this while they have no direct means of seizing upon the nitrogen contained in its great reservoir—the atmosphere. Upon certain roots of beans and peas it was noted that there were little round excrescences about the size of a small pin's head. These excrescences on examination with a microscope proved to be swarming with bacteria of minute dimensions. Further investigation abundantly showed that these little guests paid a handsome price for their board and lodging—while they subsisted in part on the juices of their host they passed into the bean or pea certain valuable compounds of nitrogen which they built from common air. At the Columbian Exposition, of 1893, one of the striking exhibits in the Agricultural Building set this forth in detail. Vials were shown containing these tiny subterranean aids to the farmer, and large photographs showed in natural size the vast increase of crop due tothe farmer's taking bacteria into partnership. To-day these little organisms are cultivated of set purpose, and quest is being made for similar bacteria suitable to be harnessed in producing wheat, corn, and other harvests.
These are times when men of science are discontented with mere observation. They wish to pass from watching things as nature presents them to putting them into relations wholly new. In 1866 DeBary, a close observer of lichens, felt confident that a lichen was not the simple growth it seems, but a combination of fungus and algæ. This opinion, so much opposed to honoured tradition, was scouted, but not for long. Before many months had passed Stahl took known algæ, and upon them sowed a known fungus, the result was a known lichen! The fungus turns out to be no other than a slave-driver that captures algæ in colonies and makes them work for him. He is, however, a slave-driver of an intelligent sort; his captives thrive under his mastery, and increase more rapidly for the healthy exercise he insists that they shall take.
It is an afternoon in August and the sultry air compels us to take shelter in a grove of swaying maples. Beneath their shade every square yard of ground bears a score of infant trees, very few of them as much as a foot in stature. How vain their expectation of one day enjoying an ample spread of branch and root, of rising to the free sunshine of upper air! The scene, with its quivering rounds of sunlight, seems peace itself,but the seeming is only a mask for war as unrelenting as that of weaponed armies. For every ray of the sunbeam, for every atom of food, for every inch of standing room, there is deadly rivalry. To begin the fight is vastly easier than to maintain it, and not one in a hundred of these bantlings will ever know maturity. We have only to do what Darwin did—count the plants that throng a foot of sod in spring, count them again in summer, and at the summer's end, to find how great the inexorable carnage in this unseen combat, how few its survivors. So hard here is the fight for a foothold, for daily bread, that the playfulness inborn in every healthy plant can peep out but timidly and seldom. But when strife is exchanged for peace, when a plant is once safely sheltered behind a garden fence, then the struggles of the battlefield give place to the diversions of the garrison—diversions not infrequently hilarious enough. Now food abounds and superabounds; henceforth neither drought nor deluge can work their evil will; insect foes, as well as may be, are kept at bay; there is room in plenty instead of dismal overcrowding. The grateful plant repays the care bestowed upon it by bursting into a sportiveness unsuspected, and indeed impossible, amidst the alarms and frays incessant in the wilderness. It departs from parental habits in most astonishing fashion, puts forth blossoms of fresh grace of form, of new dyes, of doubled magnitude. The gardener's opportunity has come. He can seizeupon such of these “sports” as he chooses and make them the confirmed habits of his wards. Take a stroll through his parterres and greenhouses, where side by side he shows you pansies of myriad tints and the modest little wild violets of kindred to the pansies' ancestral stock. Let him contrast for you roses, asters, tuberous begonias, hollyhocks, dahlias, pelargoniums, before cultivation and since. Were wild flowers clay, were the gardener both painter and sculptor, he could not have wrought marvels more glorious than these. In a few years the brethren of his guild have brought about a revolution for which, if possible at all to her, nature in the open fields would ask long centuries. And the gardener's experiments with these strange children of his have all the charm of surprise. No passive chooser is he of “sports” of promise, but an active matchmaker between flowers often brought together from realms as far apart as France and China. Sometimes his experiment is an instant success. Mr. William Paul, a famous creator of splendid flowers, tells us that at a time when climbing roses were either white or yellow, he thought he would like to produce one of bright dark colour. Accordingly he mated the Rose Athelin, of vivid crimson, with Russelliana, a hardy climber, and lo, the flower he had imagined and longed for stood revealed! But this hitting the mark at the first shot is uncommon good fortune with the gardener. No experience with primrose or chrysanthemum is long and variedenough to tell him how the crossing of two different stocks will issue. A rose which season after season opposes only indifference to all his pains may be secretly gathering strength for a bound beyond its ancestral paths which will carry it much farther than his hopes, or, perhaps, his wishes.
Most flowers are admired for their own sweet sake, but who thinks less of an apple or cherry blossom because it bears in its beauty the promise of delicious fruit? Put a red Astrachan beside a sorry crab, a Bartlett pear next a tough, diminutive wild pear such as it is descended from, an ear of milky corn in contrast with an ear one-fourth its size, each grain of which, small and dry, is wrapped in a sheath by itself; and rejoice that fruits and grains as well as flowers can learn new lessons and remember them. At Concord, Massachusetts, in an honoured old age, dwells Mr. Ephraim W. Bull. In his garden he delights to show the mother vine of the Concord grape which he developed from a native wild grape planted as long ago as 1843. Another “sport” of great value was the nectarine, which was seized upon as it made its appearance on a peach bough. Throughout America are scattered experiment stations, part of whose business it is to provoke fresh varieties of wheat, or corn, or other useful plant, and make permanent such of them as show special richness of yield; earliness in ripening; stoutness of resistance to Jack Frost, or blight, or insect pests. Suppose that dire disasterswept from off the earth every cereal used as food. Professor Goodale, Professor Asa Gray's successor at Harvard University, has so much confidence in the experiment stations of America that he deems them well able to repair the loss we have imagined; within fifty years, he thinks, from plants now uncultivated the task could be accomplished. Among the men who have best served the world by hastening nature's steps in the improvement of flowers and fruits, stands Mr. Vilmorin, of Paris. He it was who in creating the sugar beet laid the foundation for one of the chief industries of our time. One of his rules is to select at first not the plant which varies most in the direction he wishes, but the plant that varies most in any direction whatever. From it, from the instability of its very fibres, its utter forgetfulness of ancestral traditions, he finds it easiest in the long run to obtain and to establish the character he seeks of sweetness, or size, or colour.
Of flowering plants there are about 110,000, of these the farmer and the gardener between them have scarcely tamed and trained 1,000. What new riches, therefore, may we not expect from the culture of the future? Already in certain northern flower-pots the trillium, the bloodroot, the dog's-tooth violet, and the celandine are abloom in May; as June advances, the wild violet, the milkweed, the wild lily-of-the-valley, unfold their petals; later in summer the dog-rose displays its charms and breathes its perfume.All respond kindly to care, and were there more of this hospitality, were the wild roses which the botanist callsblandaandlucida, were the cardinal flowers, the May flowers, and many more of the treasures of glen and meadow, made welcome with thoughtful study of their wants and habits, much would be done to extend the wealth of our gardens. Let a hepatica be plucked from its home in a rocky crevice where one marvels how it ever contrived to root itself and find subsistence. Transplant it to good soil, give it a little care—it asks none—and it will thrive as it never throve before; proving once again that plants do not grow where they like, but where they can. The Russian columbine rewards its cultivator with a wealth of blossoms that plainly say how much it rejoices in his nurture of it, in its escape from the frost and tempest that have assailed it for so many generations.
But here we must be content to take a leaf out of nature's book, and look for small results unless our experiments are broadly planned. It is in great nurseries and gardens, not in little door-yards that “sports” are likely to arise, and to meet the skill which can confirm them as new varieties.
Japan has much to teach us with regard to flowers: nowhere else on earth are they so sedulously cultivated, or so faithfully studied in all their changeful beauty. Perhaps the most striking revelation of the Japanese gardener is his treatment of flowering shrubs and floweringtrees disposed in masses. Happy the visitors to Tokio who sees in springtime the cherry blossoms ready to lend their witchery to the Empress's reception! Much is done to extend the reign of beauty in a garden when it is fitly bordered with berry-bearers. Rows of mountain ash, snow-berry, and hawthorn trees give colour just when colour is most effective, at the time when most flowers are past and gone.
In the practical bit of ground where the kitchen garden meets the flowers, Japan has long since enlarged its bill of fare with the tuber of a cousin of our common hedge nettle, with the roots of the large burdock, commoner still. In Florida, the calla lily has use as well as beauty; it is cultivated for its potato-like tubers.
Much as the study of flowers heightens our interest in them, their first, their chief enduring charm consists in their simple beauty—their infinitely varied grace of form, their exhaustless wealth of changeful tints. Off we go with delight from desk and book to a breezy field, a wimpling brook, a quiet pond in woodland shade. A dozen rambles from May to October will show us all the floral procession, which, beginning with the trilliums and the violets, ends at the approach of frost with the golden-rod and aster. But who ever formed an engaging acquaintance without wishing it might become a close friendship? Never yet did the observant culler of bloodroot and columbine rest satisfied with merely knowing their names, and how canmore be known unless flowers are set up in a portrait gallery of their own for the leisurely study of their lineaments and lineage?
A word then as to the best way to gather wild flowers. A case for them in the form of a round tube, closed at the ends, with a hinged cover, can be made by a tinsmith at small cost. Its dimensions should be about thirty inches in length by five inches in diameter, with a strap attached to carry it by. At still less expense a frame can be made, or bought, formed of two boards, one-eighth of an inch thick, twenty-four inches long and eighteen inches broad, with two thin battens fastened across them to prevent warping. A quire of soft brown paper, newspaper will do, and a strap to hold all together, complete the outfit.
Our gathered treasures at home, we may wish to deck a table or a mantel with a few of them. The lives of impressed blossoms can be, much prolonged by exercising a little care. Punch holes in a round of cardboard and put the stalks through these holes before placing the flowers in a vase. This prevents the stalks touching each other, and so decaying before their time. A little charcoal in the water tends to keep it pure; the water should be changed daily.
A flower will fade at last be it tended ever so carefully. If we wish to preserve it dried we can best do so as soon as we bring it home, by placing it between sheets of absorbent paper (newspaper will do) well weighted down, the paper to berenewed if the plants are succulent and if there is any risk of mildew. But a dried plant after all is only a mummy. Its colours are gone; its form bruised and crumpled, gives only a faint suggestion of it as it lived and breathed. Other and more pleasant reminders of our summer rambles can be ours. With a camera of fair size it is easy to take pictures of flowers at their best; these pictures can be coloured in their natural tints with happy effect. In this art Mrs. Cornelius Van Brunt, of New York, has attained extraordinary success. Or, instead of the camera, why not at first invoke the brush and colour-box? Only a little skill in handling them is enough for a beginning. Practice soon increases deftness in this art as in every other, and in a few short weeks floral portraits are painted with a truth to nature denied the unaided pencil. For what flower, however meek and lowly, could ever tell its story in plain black and white?
The amateur painter of flowers learns a good many things by the way; at the very outset, that drawing accurate and clear must be the groundwork of any painting worthy the name. Both in the use of pencil and brush there must be a degree of painstaking observation, wholesome as a discipline and delightful in its harvests. How many of us, unused to the task of careful observation, can tell the number of the musk-mallow's petals, or mark on paper the depth of fringe on a gentian, or match from a series of dyed silks the hues of a common buttercup? Drawing andpainting sharpen the eye, and make the fingers its trained and ready servants. From the very beginning of one's task in limning bud and blossom, we see them richer in grace and loveliness than ever before. When wild flowers are sketched as they grow it is often easy to give them a new interest by adding the portraits of their insect servitors. Amateurs who are so fortunate as to visit the West Indies have an opportunity to paint the wonderful blossoms of the Marcgravia, whose minister, a humming bird, quivers above it like a bit of rainbow loosened from the sky.
Early in the history of art the wild flowers lent their aid to decoration. The acanthus which gave its leaves to crest the capital of the Corinthian column, the roses conventionalized in the rich fabrics of ancient Persia, until they have been thought sheer inventions of the weaver, are among the first items of an indebtedness which has steadily grown in volume until to-day, when the designers who find their inspiration in the flowers are a vast and increasing host. In a modern mansion of the best type the outer walls are enriched with the leonine beauty of the sun-flower; within, the mosaic floors, the silk, and paper hangings, repeat themes suggested by the vine, the wild clematis and the Mayflower. The stained glass windows from New York, where their manufacture excels that of any other city in the world, are exquisite with boldly treated lilies, poppies, and columbines.In the drawing-room are embroideries designed by two young women of Salem, Massachusetts, who have established a thriving industry in transferring the glow of wild flowers to the adornment of noble houses such as this. As one goes from studio to studio, it is cheering to find so many men and women busy at work which is more joyful than play,—which in many cases first taken up as a recreation disclosed a vein of genuine talent and so pointed to a career more delightful than any other,—because it chimes in with the love of beauty and the power of giving it worthy expression.
Transcriber's Note:Unable to locate “partnery” nor “tucu-tucu”, but they have been left as in the original.The word “sylvain” has been verified as a valid word, and therefore it has been left as in the original.
Unable to locate “partnery” nor “tucu-tucu”, but they have been left as in the original.
The word “sylvain” has been verified as a valid word, and therefore it has been left as in the original.