White and Greenish 



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 (£. Ipecaciianhae) also suggests unpleasant 

 doses, it is really a member of quite another family that furnishes 

 the old-fashioned emetic. The flowering spurge, having its stami- 

 nate 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) Sumac family 

 (/?. typhina of Gray) 



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 1 1 to 3 1 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. 



Floweri7ig Season — ^J u n e . 



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 incon- 

 spicuous 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), com- 



