1280 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



ROSIN WEED 



It grows twelve feet high and is the giant among 

 prairie flowers. 



CLOSED GENTIANS 



Flaunting beautiful sky-blue flowers to tempt 

 the bumble-bee. 



BLUE LOBELIAS 



The seeds of this dainty flower are probably 

 scattered by the wind. 



a seedling to a thousand adult plants. By the most care- 

 ful search I have not found more than a dozen all told, 

 and when a seed does start, it produces a most frail 

 plantlet. Its stem, during the first season grows scarcely 

 an inch high, the leaves are mere specks, and its tiny 

 rootlets do not reach the soil through the thick cushion 

 of moss on which the seedling nearly always starts. 



Every year, however, the root approaches by a kind of 

 hook-shaped growth a little nearer- to the soil below, but 

 I estimate that it must take a seedling from five to six 

 years to establish itself as a vigorous plant whose future 

 is assured. If nature had evolved a really successful plan 

 of pollination and seeding in the moccasin family those 

 beautiful plants should be a hundred times as numerous, 

 for the mature plants are vigorous and hardy 

 perennials. 



One of the most widely distributed plants over the 

 whole northern hemisphere is the pale-green peat moss, 

 sphagnum. It covers thousands of square miles in Eu- 

 rope, North America and Asia ; but it has almost aban- 



doned the sexual method of reproduction, and the little 

 spore capsules characteristic of all mosses are rarely 

 found. I have traveled over and camped near peat bogs 

 and marshes ever since my early boyhood, but only once 

 have I found the brown spore capsules, and that was in a 

 small rocky basin on an island in Lake Superior at the 

 entrance to the harbor of Grand Marais. I took the 

 plants home to my room in the hotel, and in the evening 

 as I was reading by lamplight, my attention was attract- 

 ed by several explosions, just barely audible. I began to 

 watch my moss plants. The warmth of the room had 

 dried the capsules to the explosive stage and every time 

 one of the little shells burst, a tiny brown cloud of 

 spores Was thrown into the air. It was the most inti- 

 mate performance in the great drama of the plant world 

 which it has ever been my good fortune to witness. The 

 scene was enacted on an August evening more than ten 

 years ago, and every summer since then, I have looked 

 for the little brown shrapnels of sphagnum but I have 

 never found them again. 



