AMERICAN FORESTRY 



THE WILD HONEYSUCKLE 



Fig. 10 One of the most delicate and fragrant of all our wild 

 flowers. It often grows in great masses, its yellow-veined 

 leaves being wonderfully striking. Photograph by the author. 



and bids fair to run up on the roof and cover the 

 chimneys soon. When in flower, or when bearing its 

 lovely bunches of dark purple berries upon scarlet stems 

 in the autumn, there being hundreds of them, and with 

 its green or scarlet leaves, depending upon the time of 

 the year, it is truly a beautiful sight. Our English 

 starlings are extremely fond of the berries, and as many 

 as a dozen of these birds sometimes flock to this big 

 climber to feed upon them. 



Plants of the moss-pink and trailing arbutus order are 

 great favorites ; they are mere creepers crawlers, really 

 ^that possess no claim entitling them to rank among the 

 true vines or climbers. 



Every lover of flowers knows the wonderfully attrac- 

 tive clematis, referred to by Schuyler Mathews as a 

 "most beautiful trailing vine, commonly found draped 

 over the bushes in copses and by moist roadsides. The 

 leaves are dark green, veiny, with three coarsely toothed 

 leaflets ; the flat clusters of small flowers with four green^ 

 ish white sepals and no petals, polygamously staminate 

 and pistillate on different plants; cross-fertilized by 

 bees." Further along he adds: "In October the flowers 



are succeeded by the gray plumy clusters of withered 

 styles (still adherent to the seed-vessels), which appear 

 under the glass like many tiny twisted tails. The 

 plants presenting this hoary appearance gave rise to the 

 popular name Old Man's Beard. The vine supports it- 

 self by a twist in the leaf -stem, the latter revolving a 

 number of times in the course of growth." This 

 plant may be seen in many of our southern cities, a single 

 specimen growing to a length of a dozen feet or more. 

 Another name for the clematis is Virgin's Bower, and 

 we also have a species known as the Purple Clematis. 



Most of us are familiar with the little trailing vine of 

 the woods known as the partridge-berry or twinberry. 

 Its dark green, evergreen leaves, veined with green- 

 ish white, are small and oval in shape. In the autumn its 

 bright red or scarlet berries, growing in pairs, attract the 

 attention of any one passing the place where it grows 

 which is often in the deepest shadows of the forest, and 

 this renders them all the more conspicuous. 



Two more familiar plants are seen in the trailing bind- 

 weed and the common dodder, the first-named being 

 related to that grand group of wonderful cultivated 



I FLOWERS .\ND LE.'SiVES OF THE WILD YAM 



Fig. 11 The roots of this well-known vine are used in phar- 

 macy, and the plant is readily recognized by its rather pale and 

 very beautiful heart-shaped leaves, which are conspicuously 

 veined. Photograph by the author. 



