COMMON AMERICAN WILD FLOWERS 



607 



reason of its efficacy as a homely remedy in 

 the treatment of wounds. 



It derives its official Latin name from the 

 Creek warrior Achilles. We are told that 

 Chiron, the centaur, taught its virtues to the 

 •defender of ancient Troy, who made from it 

 an ointment with which to heal his wounded 

 myrmidons. 



The yarrow is widely used in the remote 

 rural districts as a love charm. A girl wraps 

 it in flannel and puts it under her pillow, re- 

 peating a verse. The next day she puts it into 

 her shoe and asks it to guide her footsteps to 

 her future husband. The first single man she 

 meets is supposed to be the one it recommends 

 to her. 



When is a plant a flower and when a weed 

 is a question that often has been asked. Some 

 one has called a weed a vegetable vagabond 

 which adds to the vice of idleness the good- 

 for-nothing trait of mischievousness. 



The yarrow is a charming flower to some. 

 To the city-born it is an exquisite, lacy flower, 

 co much so that it is sometimes cultivated. In 

 the Azores it is cultivated as the lace plant, 

 and one writer reports having seen it growing 

 on the lawn of an exclusive home on Fifth 

 avenue, New York. But to the farmer whose 

 hay-fields it invades, and to his sturdy sons 

 who must work many a hot summer day to 

 keep it from running away with the farm, it 

 loses all its poetry and romance and grace and 

 "becomes a living sign of a poor farmer — 

 a weed of the worst type. 



When one considers how the yarrow chooses 

 the grass fields as its favorite habitat and 

 makes the farmer help to propagate it by cut- 

 ting it with his hay, and thus scattering its 

 seeds far and wide, he cannot but reflect upon 

 the wonderful determination with which it 

 fights extermination. 



Indeed, the more "pestiferous" a weed is to 

 a farmer, the greater have been its achieve- 

 ments in the way of overcoming obstacles. 

 One would admire greatly their gameness, 

 their generalship, and their spirit of "facing 

 their fortunes like a man" were not their tri- 

 ximphs the farmer's defeats. 



Take purslane, lambs quarter, and a dozen 

 other weeds. They need cultivation to thrive 

 well, so they steal into garden and truck patch 

 and compel the gardener to cultivate them 

 while he cultivates his vegetables. 



Then there is corn cockle, "croutweed," 

 garlic, and innumerable other weeds which like 

 nothing better than to get into a wheat-field 

 and get cut along with the wheat. The farmer 

 must thresh them with his wheat, and thus 

 they get sown in well-prepared soil once again. 



Nearly all the weeds have learned to fit 

 themselves to those farm operationswhich are 

 "best suited for their spread. That is the rea- 

 son that yarrow gets such a firm hold wher- 

 ever it goes. The farmer cannot "make hay" 

 without "making yarrow," too. 



The insect world likes the yarrow if the 

 farming population does not. More than 120 

 species of bees and butterflies visited a watched 

 plant in a single day. Its nectar stands seem 



as popular in insectdom as the pink lemonade 

 stand at a circus or a soda fountain at a corner 

 drug store on a hot day. 



GREAT WILLOW-HERB OR FIRE- 

 WEED (Chamaenerion angusti- 

 folium (L.) Scopoli) 



(See page 604) 



Nature appears to detest ugliness as much 

 as she abhors a vacuum, and seems to have 

 created the fireweed as an antidote for one of 

 the ugliest sights a landscape may offer — burnt- 

 over ground ; for it is first and foremost 

 among the flowers to labor for the blotting out 

 of these inkspots upon the carpet of the earth. 



The fireweed deserves its name, for it seems 

 to be a real Phoenix among the flowers, rising 

 out of the ashes in green and pink robes as 

 though the flames had been its friends. 



It takes to the fallow field and the dry road- 

 side when it cannot find a burnt district to 

 cover, and begins to blossom with the coming 

 of June, and only with the passing of Septem- 

 ber joins the somber host that marches to its 

 doom when Jack Frost turns executioner with 

 the cutting cold as his ax. 



A genuine cosmopolite is this "first aid" to 

 burnt-over Nature, for it is not only at home 

 in America from the Atlantic to the Pacific 

 and from Canada to the Carolinas, but also in 

 Europe and in Asia. It belongs to that exten- 

 sive family of which the evening primrose is 

 the name-giving member, and of which the 

 primrose willow, the long-stemmed sundrop, 

 the fuschia, and the enchanter's nightshade are 

 distinguished representatives. 



The scheme by which the fireweed saves 

 itself from the evil of self-fertilization is the 

 same as is used by the button bush (see page 

 588), the holding back of the styles from ma- 

 turity until such time as the pollen from the 

 flower's own anthers is gone. As soon as that 

 happens the down-curving styles bend upward, 

 so that no bee or butterfly that has come to 

 them from another flower can get a single sip 

 of nectar without first giving them numerous 

 grains of pollen dust in exchange. 



What a lesson for men in the relations of 

 the bees and butterflies with the flowers ! 

 There is keen competition and lively bidding 

 for insect favor, but there are neither strikes 

 nor price-cutting wars. A sip of nectar for a 

 dash of pollen has been for countless genera- 

 tions the ruling quotation. Both flower and 

 insect are satisfied with the bargain, and each 

 passes through the years glad that it can be of 

 service to the other and happy that the other 

 can serve it so well. 



The first instinct of every flower is so to live 

 that when it dies it ma}' live again, not in its 

 own being, but in generations of sturdy prog- 

 eny. Innumerable are the expedients which 

 they employ to bring about that happy result. 



Some of them, like the rose of Jericho, pack 

 up bodily when the dry winds of the desert 

 come along, and roll before them, root and 

 branch, until they strike some moist place, 



