110 



THE INDIANA V7EED BOOK. 



Fig. 75. Branch with flowers. (After Cox.) 



soil, mostly in old neglected fields 

 or along railways. May-Sept. It 

 is propagated by spreading root- 

 stocks, which form buds and send 

 up shoots a.t close intervals. As 

 with the hedge bindweed the top 

 growth must be kept down and the 

 roots starved out. Remedies the 

 same; or, if in small patches, hoe 

 cutting and salting. 



THE DODDER FAMILY. 

 CUSCUTACE.E. 



Yellow or whitish twining para- 

 sites with very slender stems and 

 leaves reduced to minute scales. Flowers small, mostly white, 

 borne in dense clusters: calyx 5-lobed or 5-parted; corolla bell- 

 shaped or cylindric, 5-lobed, the tube with small fringe-like scales 

 between the lobes; stamens 5; ovary 2-celled. Fruit a 1-4-seeded 

 capsule, or small globose pod, opening with a lid or bursting irreg- 

 ularly. 



A small family of leafless annual herbs with thread-like twin- 

 ing stems, known as dodders or strangle- weeds, and parasitic on 

 other herbs and shrubs by numerous minute suckers put out from 

 the stem. All dodders are parasites by suicide. That is, each 

 plant springs from a seed which furnishes it nourishment until it 

 finds some suitable host about which to coil. In coiling it con- 

 tracts and so pulls itself up by the roots. If not uprooted a por- 

 tion of the stem a few inches above the ground soon withers, dies 

 and breaks apart while the upper twining portion with its numer- 

 ous minute suckers continues to flourish on the juices of its host. 



If from the beginning one could trace its history he would 

 doubtless find that like most other plants the dodder once had 

 leaves but a weak stem, and desiring to reach the light began to 

 twine. Tasting juices by chance it was nourished by them and so 

 began a downfall which has continued until it presents the de- 

 graded spectacle of a plant without a root, without a twig, without 

 a leaf and with a stem so useless as to be inadequate to bear its 

 own weight. Other plants with smaller beginnings have gone on 

 to higher forms but the dodder, from a breach of the laws of 

 evolution, has paid one of nature'^ heaviest fines lost the organs 



