206 PEPACTON 



our native purslane is the claytonia, or spring 

 beauty, a shy, delicate plant that opens its rose- 

 colored flowers in the moist, sunny places in the 

 woods or along their borders so early in the season. 



There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated 

 ground than sheep-sorrel, also an Old World plant; 

 while our native wood-sorrel, with its white, deli- 

 cately veined flowers, or the variety with yellow 

 flowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the 

 mallow, the vetch, or tare, and other plants. We 

 have no native plant so indestructible as garden or- 

 pine, or live-forever, which our grandmothers nursed 

 and for which they are cursed by many a farmer. 

 The fat, tender, succulent dooryard stripling turned 

 out to be a monster that would devour the earth. 

 I have seen acres of meadow land destroyed by it. 

 The way to drown an amphibious animal is to never 

 allow it to come to the surface to breathe, and this 

 is the way to kill live-forever. It lives by its stalk 

 and leaf, more than by its root, and, if cropped or 

 bruised as soon as it comes to the surface, it will in 

 time perish. It laughs the plow, the hoe, the cul- 

 tivator to scorn, but grazing herds will eventually 

 scotch it. Our two species of native orpine, Sedum 

 ternatum and S, telephioides, are never troublesome 

 as weeds. 



The European weeds are sophisticated, domesti- 

 cated, civilized; they have been to school to man 

 for many hundred years, and they have learned to 

 thrive upon him: their struggle for existence has 

 been sharp and protracted; it has made them hardy 



