CONSERVATION OF AMERICAN WILD FLOWERS 



655 



destruction of all that is beautiful, and often useful, in 

 nature. With other true nature-students, I love to see 

 people bring bunches of flowers into the home, especially 

 if they be brought there for the purpose of careful botan- 

 ical study along different lines of inquiry, or even for the 

 l)urpose of at once placing them in a generous receptacle 



THE PINK AZALEA DISAPPEARING 



Fig. 2. — This beautiful specimen of the Pink Azalea (Azalea nudifiora) was 

 collected in southern Maryland early in the spring. This Azalea is classed 

 among the shrubs, and grows from three to six feet high, though generally it 

 is a branching, leafy bush. The clustered flowers come out about the same 

 time as the leaves, or a little earlier, and they are of a rose or pinkish red color- 

 sometimes very pale or almost white, with very little fragrance. It occurs 

 coast-wise from northern New England well down into the Southern States, 

 and blooms throughout the spring months in the District of Columbia. There 

 are five small teeth to the calyx; note the funnel-formed corolla, with its five 

 recurved lobes. There are five exerted stamens, with but one elongate pistil 

 bearing a single, black stigma. The leaves are dark green with unbroken outlines 

 and elliptical in contour. This elegant shrub is being rapidly exterminated in the 

 environs of our eastern cities, where it formerly grew in abundance. It is 

 frequently gathered in great bunches, only to wither and be thrown aside in 

 the woods. Pink Azalea belongs in the Heath family. 



species of vandalism: legal protection on the one hand, 

 and the inaugurating of such steps in the community as 

 will make for an enhancement of the tastes of the people 

 on the other, to the end that a love for the beautiful in 

 general, and for wild plant-life in particular, may be 

 engendered. 



Our wild flowers see another powerful and merciless 

 enemy in the automobile, or rather in the thousands of 

 people they daily convey from any one of our great cities 

 into all parts of the country, far and wide, surrounding 

 such metropolitical centres. How often we see one of 

 these cars, homeward bound, its occupants holding large 

 bunches of dogwood in full flower, and great bunches of 

 many species of other flowers and plants that have 

 attracted the eye, but not called into play that conservative 

 sense which makes for the preservation and not the 



BOTH FLOWER AND FOOD 



Fig. 3. — Of recent years Chicory or Succory (Chicorinm iiitybus) has occurred 

 abundantly in some of the Middle Atlantic States, and in the District of Colum- 

 bia; it is found growing in vacant lots in the very heart of Washington, and 

 almost everywhere in the suburban parts of the city. Its brilliant blue— or 

 sometimes white and even pinkish — flowers are familiar to many, enlivening 

 the rank verdure flourishing where the plant thrives. The flowers wilt almost 

 as soon as picked, and consequently many are needlessly destroyed. In the 

 specimen here shown the flowers were a bright sky blue, with the buds in various 

 stages of growth. They appear nearly sessile along the straight, fluted, branching 

 and hairy stems, and are entirely odorless. The elongate, oblong petals are 

 distally toothed or finely serrated, and the lanceolate leaves (not shown here) 

 are entire. Confined chiefly to eastern districts, it came, nevertheless, appar- 

 ently from far-off Arabia. Its long, somewhat stoutish roots furnish the chicory 

 with which coffee is adulterated. In France a salad is made of its leaves, and 

 the roots are eaten in Egypt. In Washington it blooms from mid-summer until 

 late in the autumn. The specimen here shown is a good representative of the 

 Chicory family, to which it belongs. It is reproduced natural size from a photo- 

 graph by the author. 



