AMERICAN WILD FLOWERS 



517 



much for their beauty and their decorative 

 value, are detested by the farmer, who has to 

 fight them in season and out to prevent them, 

 along with the ragweed, the plantain, and many 

 other weeds from taking possession of his 

 fields and ruining his crop of hay. 



SHOWY LADY'S-SLIPPER (Cypripedium 



reginae Walt.) 



(See page 505) 



Living in peat-bogs, or in rich, low, wet 

 woods, flowering from June to September, and 

 having a range that reaches from Nova Scotia 

 to Georgia and from the Atlantic to the Mis- 

 sissippi, the showy lady's-slipper, a member of 

 the orchid family, has been voted by Dr. Gray 

 the most beautiful belle that ever came out 

 from beneath an orchid roof tree. It never 

 seeks the haunts of man, but tries to remove 

 itself as far from their comings and goings as 

 it can, and it succeeds so well that only the 

 flower lover who is willing to take pains can 

 approach its dwelling-place and behold its lib- 

 erty in its native environment. 



Further than this, it is so persistent in its 

 efforts to be let alone that it has come to have 

 tiny glandular hairs which contain an oil that 

 is somewhat poisonous to the human skin, and 

 it is said that a number of cases of dermatitis 

 have followed the efforts of flower lovers to 

 carry it in triumph out of the woods. 



As a member of the orchid famih', the showy 

 lady's-slipper shares the tradition of that fam- 

 ily's origin, which is one that is neither beauti- 

 ful nor attractive; for the first Orchis was the 

 son of a nymph and a satyr, hence a fellow 

 of unbounded passion. At a festival of Bac- 

 chus, being warm with drink, he attacked a 

 priestess ; whereupon the whole congregation 

 fell upon him and rent him limb from limb. 

 His father prayed the gods to put him together 

 again, but the gods refused, tempering their 

 severity, however, by saying that whereas the 

 deceased had been a nuisance in his life, he 

 should be a satisfaction in his death ; so they 

 changed him to the flower that bears his name. 

 Even the flower was alleged to retain temper, 

 and to eat its root was to suffer momentary 

 conversion into the satyr state. 



THE TWIN BERRY OR PARTRIDGE 

 BERRY (Mitchella repens L.) 



(See page 506) 



Another of the truly "wild" flowers that asks 

 man only to be let alone in the fastness of the 

 forest is the twin berry, which is a member of 

 the madder family. Strange to say, it is a 

 distant relative of the coffee and the cinchona 

 tree, and also of the madder, whose fruits 

 furnish the red dye and the artist's permanent 

 pigment of that name. It is also a relative of 

 the dainty little quaker-lady, the bedstraw, the 

 goose grass, and the wild licorice. Its flow- 

 ering season is from April to June and it some- 

 times fills a return engagement in the autumn. 

 Its range is from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of 

 Mexico and from the Atlantic seaboard to 

 Minnesota and Texas. 



The flowers of the twin berry have a system 

 of securing cross-fertilization which is differ- 

 ent_ from any of those heretofore described. 

 This is known as dimorphism. There are two 

 different kinds of flowers — the one has mature 

 stamens and immature stigmas and the other 

 has mature stigmas and immature stamens. 

 By this process no flower can fertilize itself 

 and must rely upon its insect benefactor to 

 prevent it from disappearing from the world 

 through lack of ability to mature its seeds. 

 Short-tongued bees and flies cannot reach the 

 twin berry's nectar because of the hairs inside 

 the tube, but the larger bees and butterflies 

 which suck the nectar from the flowers with the 

 tall stamens receive pollen on the exact spot on 

 their long tongues that will come into contact 

 with the sticky stigmas of another flower. 



The two flowers at the top of a branch grow 

 united in such a way that they seem to be 

 Siamese twins of flowerland. It is from the 

 fruit resulting from this union that the twin 

 berry gets its name. Experience is said to 

 prove that when only one of the twin flowers 

 is pollenized by insects fruit rarely sets as a 

 result, but when both are pollenized a healthy 

 seeded berry follows. 



MAYFLOWER OR TRAILING AR- 

 BUTUS (Epigaea repens L.) 



(See page 506) 



The eastern half of North America, from 

 Newfoundland and the Northwest Territory 

 to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, possesses 

 that delightful little harbinger of spring, the 

 mayflower or trailing arbutus. With its ever- 

 green leaves nipped by the frosts of winter 

 and weather-worn by the cold, relentless battle 

 they must fight for existence through the grim 

 winter, and with its flowers seeming to form 

 nature's prelude to the fragrance of summer, 

 from the days of Plymouth Rock itself the 

 majrflower or trailing arbutus has gladdened 

 the heart of man as it has proclaimed the dawn 

 of spring. The poet tells us that the mayflower 

 was the first sign that the Pilgrim fathers had 

 that the winter was over ; that the springtime 

 was coming, and that the summer was appear- 

 ing in the distance — not onlj^ the winter and the 

 springtime and the summer, climatically speak- 

 ing, but the winter of the Pilgrims" fear, the 

 springtime of their hopes, and the summer of 

 their dreams realized. 



With all of its message of hope and cheer, 

 as it proclaims the ending of the season of 

 snow and harbingers the beginning of the sea- 

 son of bud and blossom, the mayflower still 

 resists the effort of man to lead it into cap- 

 tivity. No more is the eagle at home in the 

 farmyard or the cardinal in the cage than the 

 mayflower in the garden. As the imprisoned 

 cardinal pines away and dies when the gilded 

 bars of a bird-cage separate it from its liberty, 

 so the mayflower lives unhappih^ and unprofit- 

 ably in the garden, and finally gives up its 

 effort to adapt itself to its new environment as 

 vain. However, man's patience and skill is 

 finding a means of taming this wild flower 

 (see page 518). 



