Wild Flowers An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors

Neltje Blanchan

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. Surely a foreword of explanation is called for from one who has the temerity to offer a surfeited public still another book on wild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almost every blossom in the world is everything it is because of its necessity to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - its form, mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening and closing, and its season of blooming being the result of natural selection by that special insect upon which each depends more or less absolutely for help in perpetuating its species - it seems fully time that the vitally important and interesting relationship existing between our common wild flowers and their winged benefactors should be presented in a popular book.

Informations

• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819944942
• Langue: English

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PREFACE
Surely a foreword of explanation is called for fromone who has the temerity to offer a surfeited public still anotherbook on wild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almostevery blossom in the world is everything it is because of itsnecessity to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - itsform, mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening andclosing, and its season of blooming being the result of naturalselection by that special insect upon which each depends more orless absolutely for help in perpetuating its species - it seemsfully time that the vitally important and interesting relationshipexisting between our common wild flowers and their wingedbenefactors should be presented in a popular book.
Is it enough to know merely the name of the floweryou meet in the meadow? The blossom has an inner meaning, hopes andfears that inspire its brief existence, a scheme of salvation forits species in the struggle for survival that it has been slowlyperfecting with some insect's help through the ages. It is not apassive thing to be admired by human eyes, nor does it waste itssweetness on the desert air. It is a sentient being, impelled toact intelligently through the same strong desires that animate us,and endowed with certain powers differing only in degree, but notin kind, from those of the animal creation. Desire ever createsform.
Do you doubt it? Then study the mechanism of one ofour common orchids or milkweeds that are adjusted with suchmarvelous delicacy to the length of a bee's tongue or of abutterfly's leg; learn why so many flowers have sticky calices orprotective hairs; why the skunk cabbage, purple trillium, andcarrion flower emit a fetid odor while other flowers, especiallythe white or pale yellow night bloomers, charm with their deliciousbreath; see if you cannot discover why the immigrant daisy alreadywhitens our fields with descendants as numerous as the sands of theseashore, whereas you may tramp a whole day without finding asingle native ladies' slipper. What of the sundew that not onlycatches insects, but secretes gastric juice to digest them? What ofthe bladderwort, in whose inflated traps tiny crustaceans areimprisoned, or the pitcher plant, that makes soup of its guests?Why are gnats and flies seen about certain flowers, bees,butterflies, moths or humming birds about others, each visitorchoosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinitepains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly arepilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitiousflowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreedingthrough fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove theoperation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they sendseeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studiedwith profit by Anglo-Saxon expansionists. Do vice and virtue existside by side in the vegetable world also? Yes, and every sinner isbranded as surely as was Cain. The dodder, Indian pipe, broomrapeand beech-drops wear the floral equivalent of the striped suit andthe shaved head. Although claiming most respectable and exaltedkinsfolk, they are degenerates not far above the fungi. In short,this is a universe that we live in; and all that share the One Lifeare one in essence, for natural law is spiritual law. “ThroughNature to God, ” flowers show a way to the scientist lackingfaith.
Although it has been stated by evolutionists formany years that in order to know the flowers, their insectrelationships must first be understood, it is believed that“Nature's Garden” is the first American work to explain them in anyconsiderable number of species. Dr. Asa Gray, William HamiltonGibson, Clarence Moores Weed, and Miss Maud Going in theirdelightful books or lectures have shown the interdependence of ascore or more of different blossoms and their insect visitors.Hidden away in the proceedings of scientific societies' technicalpapers are the invaluable observations of such men as Dr. WilliamTrelease of Wisconsin and Professor Charles Robertson of Illinois.To the latter especially, I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness.Sprengel, Darwin, Muller, Delpino, and Lubbock, among others, havegiven the world classical volumes on European flora only, butshowing a vast array of facts which the theory of adaptation toinsects alone correlates and explains. That the results ofillumining researches should be so slow in enlightening the popularmind can be due only to the technical, scientific language used insetting them forth, language as foreign to the average reader asChinese, and not to be deciphered by the average student either,without the help of a glossary. These writings, as well as the vastarray of popular books - too many for individual mention - havebeen freely consulted after studies made afield.
To Sprengel belongs the glory of first exaltingflowers above the level of botanical specimens. After studying thewild geranium he became convinced, as he wrote in 1787, that “thewise Author of Nature has not made even a single hair without adefinite design. A hundred years before, one, Nehemias Grew, hadsaid that it was necessary for pollen to reach the stigma of aflower in order that it might set fertile seed, and Linnaeus bad tocome to his rescue with conclusive evidence to convince a doubtingworld that he was right. Sprengel made the next step forward, buthis writings lay neglected over seventy years because he advancedthe then incredible and only partially true statement that a floweris fertilized by insects which carry its pollen from its anthers toits stigma. In spite of his discoveries that the hairs within thewild geranium protect its nectar from rain for the insectbenefactor's benefit; that most flowers which secrete nectar havewhat he termed ”honey guides" - spots of bright color, heavyveining, or some such pathfinder for the visitor on the petals;that sometimes the male flowers, the staminate ones, are separatedfrom the seed-bearing or pistillate ones on distinct plants, heleft it to Darwin to show that cross-fertilization by insects, thetransfer of pollen from one blossom to another - not from anthersto stigma of the same flower - is the great end to which so muchmarvelous floral mechanism is adapted. The wind is a wasteful,uncertain pollen distributor. Insects transfer it moreeconomically, especially the more highly organized and industriousones. In a few instances hummingbirds, as well, unwittingly do theflower's bidding while they feast now here, now there. In spite ofSprengel's most patient and scientific research, that shed greatlight on the theory of natural selection a half century beforeDarwin advanced it, he never knew that flowers are nearly alwayssterile to pollen of another species when carried to them on thebodies of insect visitors, or that cross-pollenized blossoms defeatthe self-pollinated ones in the struggle for survival. These factsDarwin proved in endless experiments.
Because bees depend absolutely upon flowers, notonly for their own food but for that of future generations for whomthey labor; because they are the most diligent of all visitors, andare rarely diverted from one species of flower to another while ontheir rounds collecting, as they must, both nectar and pollen, itfollows they are the most important fertilizing agents. It isestimated that, should they perish, more than half the flowers inthe world would be exterminated with them! Australian farmersimported clover from Europe, and although they had luxuriant fieldsof it, no seed was set for next year's planting, because they hadfailed to import the bumblebee. After his arrival, their loss wasspeedily made good.
Ages before men cultivated gardens, they had tinyhelpers they knew not of. Gardeners win all the glory of producinga Lawson pink or a new chrysanthemum; but only for a few seasons dothey select, hybridize, according to their own rules of taste. Theytake up the work where insects left it off after countlesscenturies of toil. Thus it is to the night-flying moth, long oftongue, keen of scent, that we are indebted for the deep, white,fragrant Easter lily, for example, and not to the florist; albeitthe moth is in his turn indebted to the lily for the length of histongue and his keen nerves: neither could have advanced without theother. What long vistas through the ages of creation does not thisinterdependence of flowers and insects open!
Over five hundred flowers in this book have beenclassified according to color, because it is believed that thenovice, with no knowledge of botany whatever, can most readilyidentify the specimen found afield by this method, which has theadded advantage of being the simple one adopted by the higherinsects ages before books were written. Technicalities have beenavoided in the text wherever possible, not to discourage thebeginner from entering upon one of the most enjoyable and elevatingbranches of Nature study. The scientific names and classificationfollow that method adopted by the International Botanical Congresswhich has now superseded all others; nevertheless the titlesemployed by Gray, with which older botanists in this country arefamiliar, are also indicated where they differ from the newnomenclature.
NELTJE BLANCHAN, New York, March, 1900
FROM BLUE TO PURPLE FLOWERS
“If blue is the favorite color of bees, and if beeshave so much to do with the origin of flowers, how is it that thereare so few blue ones? I believe the explanation to be that all blueflowers have descended from ancestors in which the flowers weregreen; or, to speak more precisely, in which the leaves surroundingthe stamens and pistil were green; and that they have passedthrough stages of white or yellow, and generally red, beforebecoming blue. ” - Sir John Lubbock in “Ants, Bees, and Wasps.”
VIRGINIA or COMMON DAY-FLOWER
(Commelina Virginica) Spiderwort family
Flowers - Blue, 1 in. broad or less, irregular,grouped at end of stem, and upheld by long leaf-like