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.
Is it enough to know merely the name of the flower you meet in
the meadow? The blossom has an inner meaning, hopes and fears
that inspire its brief existence, a scheme of salvation for its
species in the struggle for survival that it has been slowly
perfecting with some insect's help through the ages. It is not a
passive thing to be admired by human eyes, nor does it waste its
sweetness on the desert air. It is a sentient being, impelled to
act intelligently through the same strong desires that animate
us, and endowed with certain powers differing only in degree, but
not in kind, from those of the animal creation. Desire ever
creates form.
Do you doubt it? Then study the mechanism of one of our common
orchids or milkweeds that are adjusted with such marvelous
delicacy to the length of a bee's tongue or of a butterfly's leg;
learn why so many flowers have sticky calices or protective
hairs; why the skunk cabbage, purple trillium, and carrion flower
emit a fetid odor while other flowers, especially the white or
pale yellow night bloomers, charm with their delicious breath;
see if you cannot discover why the immigrant daisy already
whitens our fields with descendants as numerous as the sands of
the seashore, whereas you may tramp a whole day without finding a
single native ladies' slipper. What of the sundew that not only
catches insects, but secretes gastric juice to digest them? What
of the bladderwort, in whose inflated traps tiny crustaceans are
imprisoned, 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 visitor
choosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinite
pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly
are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious
flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding
through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the
operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send
seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studied
with profit by Anglo-Saxon expansionists. Do vice and virtue
exist side by side in the vegetable world also? Yes, and every
sinner is branded as surely as was Cain. The dodder, Indian pipe,
broomrape and beech-drops wear the floral equivalent of the
striped suit and the shaved head. Although claiming most
respectable and exalted kinsfolk, they are degenerates not far
above the fungi. In short, this is a universe that we live in;
and all that share the One Life are one in essence, for natural
law is spiritual law. "Through Nature to God," flowers show a way
to the scientist lacking faith.
Although it has been stated by evolutionists for many years that
in order to know the flowers, their insect relationships must
first be understood, it is believed that "Nature's Garden" is the
first American work to explain them in any considerable number of
species. Dr. Asa Gray, William Hamilton Gibson, Clarence Moores
Weed, and Miss Maud Going in their delightful books or lectures
have shown the interdependence of a score or more of different
blossoms and their insect visitors. Hidden away in the
proceedings of scientific societies' technical papers are the
invaluable observations of such men as Dr. William Trelease 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,
have given the world classical volumes on European flora only,
but showing a vast array of facts which the theory of adaptation
to insects alone correlates and explains. That the results of
illumining researches should be so slow in enlightening the
popular mind can be due only to the technical, scientific
language used in setting them forth, language as foreign to the
average reader as Chinese, and not to be deciphered by the
average student either, without the help of a glossary. These
writings, as well as the vast array of popular books - too many
for individual mention - have been freely consulted after studies
made afield.
To Sprengel belongs the glory of first exalting flowers above the
level of botanical specimens. After studying the wild geranium he
became convinced, as he wrote in 1787, that "the wise Author of
Nature has not made even a single hair without a definite design.
A hundred years before, one, Nehemias Grew, had said that it was
necessary for pollen to reach the stigma of a flower in order
that it might set fertile seed, and Linnaeus bad to come to his
rescue with conclusive evidence to convince a doubting world that
he was right. Sprengel made the next step forward, but his
writings lay neglected over seventy years because he advanced the
then incredible and only partially true statement that a flower
is fertilized by insects which carry its pollen from its anthers
to its stigma. In spite of his discoveries that the hairs within
the wild geranium protect its nectar from rain for the insect
benefactor's benefit; that most flowers which secrete nectar have
what he termed "honey guides" - spots of bright color, heavy
veining, or some such pathfinder for the visitor on the petals;
that sometimes the male flowers, the staminate ones, are
separated from the seed-bearing or pistillate ones on distinct
plants, he left it to Darwin to show that cross-fertilization by
insects, the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another - not
from anthers to stigma of the same flower - is the great end to
which so much marvelous floral mechanism is adapted. The wind is
a wasteful, uncertain pollen distributor. Insects transfer it
more economically, especially the more highly organized and
industrious ones. In a few instances hummingbirds, as well,
unwittingly do the flower's bidding while they feast now here,
now there. In spite of Sprengel's most patient and scientific
research, that shed great light on the theory of natural
selection a half century before Darwin advanced it, he never knew
that flowers are nearly always sterile to pollen of another
species when carried to them on the bodies of insect visitors, or
that cross-pollenized blossoms defeat the self-pollinated ones in
the struggle for survival. These facts Darwin proved in endless
experiments.
Because bees depend absolutely upon flowers, not only for their
own food but for that of future generations for whom they labor;
because they are the most diligent of all visitors, and are
rarely diverted from one species of flower to another while on
their rounds collecting, as they must, both nectar and pollen, it
follows they are the most important fertilizing agents. It is
estimated that, should they perish, more than half the flowers in
the world would be exterminated with them! Australian farmers
imported clover from Europe, and although they had luxuriant
fields of it, no seed was set for next year's planting, because
they had failed to import the bumblebee. After his arrival, their
loss was speedily made good.
Ages before men cultivated gardens, they had tiny helpers they
knew not of. Gardeners win all the glory of producing a Lawson
pink or a new chrysanthemum; but only for a few seasons do they
select, hybridize, according to their own rules of taste. They
take up the work where insects left it off after countless
centuries of toil. Thus it is to the night-flying moth, long of
tongue, keen of scent, that we are indebted for the deep, white,
fragrant Easter lily, for example, and not to the florist; albeit
the moth is in his turn indebted to the lily for the length of
his tongue and his keen nerves: neither could have advanced
without the other. What long vistas through the ages of creation
does not this interdependence of flowers and insects open!
Over five hundred flowers in this book have been classified
according to color, because it is believed that the novice, with
no knowledge of botany whatever, can most readily identify the
specimen found afield by this method, which has the added
advantage of being the simple one adopted by the higher insects
ages before books were written. Technicalities have been avoided
in the text wherever possible, not to discourage the beginner
from entering upon one of the most enjoyable and elevating
branches of Nature study. The scientific names and classification
follow that method adopted by the International Botanical
Congress which has now superseded all others; nevertheless the
titles employed by Gray, with which older botanists in this
country are familiar, are also indicated where they differ from
the new nomenclature.