THE PLANT WOELD 31 



iiearlj^ as much interested in their progress as in that of his neighbor's 

 baby. 



Fruits and seed-pods present another subject of i)leasurable inves- 

 tigation during winter outings. Many berries i)ersist on the bush nearly 

 or quite until spring, as of various species of holly worts and smilax and 

 the sugarberry, while of dry seed-vessels, as every one knows, the 

 number is very great. To one who loves plants few exercises are more 

 fascinating than the taste of solving the riddle of some leafless stalk by 

 means of a resistent seed-vessel, and study of this kind has a special 

 merit in that it frequently fixes attention on characteristics that other- 

 wise would perhaps have been overlooked. Of course, with such 

 meagerness of material as is provided by a withered pod — and that, per- 

 haps, seedless — these detective studies in botany are full of baffling 

 difficulties. That, however, serves all the more to stimulate one's inge- 

 nuity, and to make one alive to such helping clues as may be afforded by 

 some late cKnging leaf or some feature present in the bark or in the 

 plant's tissue. Thus more than one novice who was puzzled over the 

 identity of the black fist of fruit which the skunk cabbage casts upon 

 the winter earth, has first learned what it was by getting a whiff of the 

 assafoetida-like odor that is released on cracking out the seeds. Indeed 

 a man must be very learned or very unobservant, if a winter afternoon 

 in the fields and by the fencerows does not make him richer by at least 

 one fact or suggestion or fruitful fancy added to his mental store. These 

 bits of knowledge apprehended directly from nature's lips are rarely 

 ever forgotten, and the intellectual palate finds in them the same in- 

 definable sprightliness of flavor that delights the physical taste in the 

 meat of a nut picked from the ground or of a berry gathered from the 

 bush. 



Then, too, winter's bareness of leaf sometimes reveals the hiding 

 places of rare plants whose existence in a given locality had not been 

 suspected. On the outskirts of the city of Camden, New Jerssy, is a 

 bit of a swampy woodland which I included in a ramble one cold after- 

 noon. As I stepped from hummock to hummock under the alders and 

 red maples, my attention was attracted by patches of long purplish 

 spatulate leaves arranged in clusters flat on the frozen earth. The more 

 I looked at them the surer I became that I had never seen that plant in 

 my excursions near home, and the more curious I grew to know it by 

 name, but in the absence of flowers or fruit, the problem seemed hope- 

 less of immediate solution. Suddenly memory waked up and it flashed 

 into my mind that these were the radical leaves of the very local Helonias 

 bidlata — a rarity which at that time I had met with but once and for 

 which I knew of no locality except in the pine barrens many miles away. 

 So, too, the rare climbing fern {Lygodium palmatum) may be readily 



