56 UNDER THE OPEN SKY 



picked, it is so apt to be soon cleared out 

 of the neighborhood. It is one of the first 

 flowers to disappear from the vicinity of 

 our large towns. 



As was mentioned, the arbutus has many 

 more or less distant relatives, such as the 

 wintergreen and the partridge berry, the 

 prince's pine, the rhododendron and the 

 laurel. But there is only one of them gen- 

 uinely close of kin in the world, and it lives 

 in Japan. This tells, to the botanist, a 

 strange story. When the climate of the 

 northern hemisphere was warmer, the com- 

 mon ancestor of these two plants grew in 

 the northern parts of both America and 

 Asia. 



OUR FLOWERS AND THE ICE AGE 



Then came that strange glacial period, 

 when the coating of ice and snow crept 

 down from the far north, covering all New 

 England and parts of the line of States out 

 from Pennsylvania through Ohio, Missouri, 

 Kansas, and Montana. It is this great 

 glacial sheet that scraped out and dammed 



