OUR VANISHING WIIJ) FLOWERS 



297 



to us is the problem before the flower protectionists, 

 the problem that conservationists meet at every turn and 

 that we must solve or the desert will inevitably follow 

 our present civilization and overtake it as it has those 

 of the past. 



One's first thought is that we may save the wild 

 flowers by cultivating them. Without doubt thousands 

 of people have been moved to try this with trailing arbu- 

 tus. Few, indeed, have succeeded. Transferred to 

 good garden soil, carefully watered and tended, enriched 

 with fertilizer or whatever you please the Mayflower 

 plant obstinately refuses to respond to kindness and 

 wilts and dies as if transplanted into unmoistened dust. 

 Scientific investigation carried on by the United 

 States Department of Agriculture of late 

 years has shown the reason for this. It 

 was found, for instance, that that 

 most useful wild fruit, the blue- 

 berr>-, luxuriates only in soil so 

 acid that garden plants simply 

 die of starvation when placed in 

 it. As the blueberry placed in 

 ordinary alkaline garden soil in- 

 variablv dies, so does the arbu- 



times of our most loved and commonest wild flowers. 

 Search the botanical textbooks from the old-time stan- 

 dard of Asa Gray down to the present day and you will 

 find the fruit of the mayflower invariably referred to as 

 a carpel a dry indehiscent pod yet Frederick Colville 

 found in his researches hundreds of mayflower fruits in 

 a single afternoon on a New Hampshire hillside and 

 everyone of them was white-fleshed and edible and as 

 juicy as a strawberry, no pod at all, but an enlarged, 

 fleshy receptacle. The ants, lovers of all sweets, har- 

 vest these berries and bear them to their underground 

 sandhill nests, whence the sprouting seeds send forth 



more trailing ar- 

 butus to glad- 

 den the 



HEPATICA EARLIEST AND DAINTIEST FLOWER OF 

 DELICATELY SHADED FROM LILAC WHITE TO P.\LE 

 AND LIGHT VIOLET; AND ABOVE, IN THE OVAL, AN 

 SITE CLUMP OF GAY MOUNTAIN LAUREL. 



tus. Moreover, it is found by microscopical examina- 

 tion that a nitrogen fixing bacteria, such as that which 

 in the root tubercles of the clover nourishes the plant, 

 occurs also with the blueberry and mayflower, both in- 

 habitants of acid-soil barrens. The proper conditions 

 for the plant being fulfilled the very acid soil and the 

 special root haunting bacteria, being supplied, the may- 

 flower may be transplanted or raised from seed and will 

 thrive. 



It might be told in passing that these experimental 

 investigations by the Department of Agriculture gave us 

 an interesting sidelight on how little we know some- 



SPRING, 



PURPLE 



EXQUI- 



hearts 

 of flower lovers. 

 It may readily be seen 

 that the cultivation of the mayflower by trans- 

 planting or raising from seed is a difficult if 

 not impossible proposition for the average 

 gardener. There remain two other methods, 

 the first the prohibition or at least the restric- 

 tion of the privilege of picking it. In all places 

 near large cities the wild things of the woods 

 become a commercial proposition. While the 

 average woodland visitor loves the mountain 

 laurel for its conspicuously beautiful flowers 

 and takes personal toll of them -a toll which 

 is harmless in a single case, but which merges 

 in complete destruction when one motor load of visitors 

 follows another all day long the florist sweeps the hill- 

 sides bare of branches at all seasons that he may sell the 

 evergreen leaves for decoration. Thus love of flowers 

 and love of money combine to make deserts of the hill- 

 sides that in June were unbelievably beautiful with pink 

 bloom and throughout the rest of the year werebravewith 

 unfailing green. As with the laurel so with the holly, 

 the flowering dogwood, the evergreen ferns. Commer- 

 cialism is making them rare throughout great areas, 

 will in the end extirpate them unless the spirit of conser- 

 vation is roused in the community and conquers. Some- 



