230 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 
All these flowers, if the moths have failed them, 
will perhaps be visited and fertilized by the sun- 
shine-loving butterflies. 
Linnzus had the pretty idea of a time-keeping 
garden, and he drew up for the latitude of Up- 
sala, in Sweden, a list of plants, arranged accord- 
ing to the time at which their buds expand. 
This list is the famous ‘‘ floral clock,” ‘‘ whose 
wheels,’’ says Jean Paul Richter, ‘‘are the sun 
and earth and whose index figures are flowers.” 
De Candolle, the French botanist, arranged an- 
other floral clock for the vicinity of Paris. 
The suggestion has charmed the popular fancy 
and excited the fertile inventiveness of the penny- 
a-liners. So every now and then a newspaper ar- 
ticle appears, stating exact times for the opening 
and closing of familiar flowers, and it goes the 
rounds, giving unsuspecting people to understand 
that flowers are as punctual as  express-trains. 
But blossoms are not accurate. timekeepers. The 
honeysuckle, as we have seen, takes to itself a 
margin of four hours, and Linnzus’s floral clock 
allows for variations of an hour or two in almost 
every plant. No clock of bloom would serve as a 
substitute for the mechanical clock of commerce, 
that soulless autocrat which tyrannizes over our 
