Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 



All these flowers, if the moths have failed them, 

 will perhaps be visited and fertilized by the sun- 

 shine-loving butterflies. 



Linnaeus had the pretty idea of a time-keeping 

 garden, and he drew up for the latitude of Up- 

 sala, in Sweden, a list of plants, arranged accord- 

 ing to the time at which their buds expand. 

 This list is the famous " floral clock," " whose 

 wheels," says Jean Paul Richter, "are the sun 

 and earth and whose index figures are flowers." 



De Candolle, the French botanist, arranged an- 

 other floral clock for the vicinity of Paris. 



The suggestion has charmed the popular fancy 

 and excited the fertile inventiveness of the penny- 

 a-liners. So every now and then a newspaper ar- 

 ticle appears, stating exact times for the opening 

 and closing of familiar flowers, and it goes the 

 rounds, giving unsuspecting people to understand 

 that flowers are as punctual as express-trains. 

 But blossoms are not accurate timekeepers. The 

 honeysuckle, as we have seen, takes to itself a 

 margin of four hours, and Linnaeus's floral clock 

 allows for variations of an hour or two in almost 

 every plant. No clock of bloom would serve as a 

 substitute for the mechanical clock of commerce, 

 that soulless autocrat which tyrannizes over our 



