AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS 27 



always hidden beneath the moss or dry leaves, 

 as if too modest to face the light of the open 

 woods. As a rule, the one thing which a plant 

 is anxious to show and to make much of, and 

 to flaunt before all the world, is its flower. 

 But the wild ginger reverses the rule and 

 blooms in secret. Instead of turning upward 

 toward the light and air, it turns downward 

 toward the darkness and the silence. It has 

 no corolla, but what the botanists call a lurid 

 or brown-purple calyx, which is conspicuous 

 like a corolla. Its root leaves in the mouth a 

 taste precisely like that of ginger. 



This plant and the closed gentian are appar- 

 ent exceptions, in their manner of blooming, to 

 the general habit of the rest of our flowers. 

 The closed gentian does not hide its flower, but 

 the corolla never opens; it always remains a 

 closed bud. It probably never experiences the 

 benefits of insect visits, which Darwin showed 

 us were of such importance in the vegetable 

 world. I once plucked one of the flowers into 

 which a bumble-bee had forced his wav, but he 

 had never come out; the flower was his tomb. 



There is yet another curious exception which 

 I will mention, namely, the witch-hazel. All 

 our trees and plants bloom in the spring, except 

 this one species; this blooms in the fall. Just 

 as its leaves are fading and falling, its flowers 

 appear, giving out an odor along the bushy 

 lanes and margins of the woods that is to the 

 nose like cool water to the hand. Why it 

 should bloom in the fall instead of in the 



