White and Greenish 



The beautiful, low-growing Stagger-busli {Pieris Mariana) 

 has its small, cylindric, five-parted, white or pink-tinted flowers 

 clustered at intervals along one side of the upright, nearly leafless, 

 smooth, dark-dotted branches of the preceding year. When the 

 glossy oval leaves, black dotted beneath, are freshly put forth in 

 early summer — for the shrub is not strictly an evergreen, however 

 late the old leaves may cling — it is said that stupid sheep and calves, 

 which find them irresistibly attractive, stagger about from their 

 poisonous effect just as they do after feeding on this shrub's rela- 

 tive the Lambkill (p. 127). In sandy soil from southern New 

 England to Florida, rarely far inland, one finds the stagger-bush in 

 bloom from May to July. On the dry plains of Long Island, where 

 it is common indeed, it appears a not unworthy relative of the 

 Fetter-bush {Pieris floribunda), that exquisite little evergreen with 

 quantities of small white urns drooping along its twigs, which 

 nurserymen acquire from the mountains of our Southern States to 

 adorn garden shrubbery at home and abroad. Mr. William Rob- 

 inson, in his delightful book, "The English Flower Garden" (a 

 book, by the way, that Rudyard Kipling reads as the Puritan read 

 his Bible), counts this fetter-bush among the "indispensables." 



Much taller than the preceding dwarfs is the Common Privet 

 Andromeda found in swamps and low ground from New England 

 to the Gulf and in the southwest (Xofe7M«/?^Kszfnwfl). Whoever has 

 seen the privet almost universally grown in hedges is familiar with 

 the general aspect of this much-branched shrub. Most farmers' 

 boys know the Andromeda's mock May-apple, a hollow, stringy 

 growth of insect origin, which they are not likely to confuse with the 

 pulpy, juicy apple found on the closely related azaleas (p. 122). 

 Abundant terminal spike-like or branched clusters of white, globu- 

 lar, four or five parted flowers in close array, attract quantities of 

 bees from the end of May to earlyjuly, notwithstanding each indi- 

 vidual flower measures barely an eighth of an inch across. We 

 have seen the fine hair-triggers which other members of this same 

 family, the beautiful pink laurels (p. 125), have set to be sprung by 

 an incoming visitor. Now this Andromeda, and similarly several of 

 its immediate kin, have a quite different, but equally effective, 

 method of throwing pollen on its friends who come to call. 

 When one of the little banded bees clings, as he must, to the tiny 

 flower scarce half his size, thrusting his tongue obliquely through 

 the globe's narrow opening to reach the nectar, suddenly a shower 

 of pollen is inhospitably thrown upon him from within. In prob- 

 ing between the ring of anthers (that are pressed against the style 

 by the S-shaped curvature of the filaments so as to retain the 

 pollen), he needs must displace some of them and release the vital- 

 izing dust through the large terminal pores in the anther-sacs. 

 Is he discouraged by such rough treatment ? Not at all. Off he 



236 



