[Illustration: [Convolvulus]]
This is a large and, on the whole, aristocratic family.
About two thousand different kinds of plants belong to it; but not so
many in our climate. Perhaps not more than two hundred of the
Convolvulaceæ, which is the proper name of this family, come as far
North as we live.
They are rather cold-blooded people, these Convolvulaceæ, and prefer to
stay in or near the tropics.
Up our way are the morning-glories, as you know. This is not their
native home, though, as it is of the bloodroots, the bindweeds, and all
the other wild flowers.
They were brought here from the hot part of America, near the equator.
Somebody saw them, no doubt, and of course fell in love with them and
sent some seeds to their friends in the North, or else took them when
they went home.
Perhaps a sailor boy, landing in South America and seeing the bright
flowers in the morning sunshine, thought of the New England village
where he lived and which he often longed for there in that strange hot
country, and perhaps he sent the seeds of these bright flowers home in a
letter. But whoever may have sent the first seeds, it is certain the
morning-glories received a hearty welcome in our Northern world. And
they soon behaved like old settlers.
They grew cheerily where they were planted, and their seeds fell to the
ground, where they managed to survive the cold Northern winter.
This must have been a great surprise to them the first time they felt
it!
Then up they came in the spring just as though they were at home. They
even strayed away from the people’s gardens and grew wild near the
villages.
Perhaps they met their Northern cousins the bindweeds there. And what a
surprise _that_ must have been,—to come up from South America and find a
member of one’s own family who had always lived in the cold North!
See how astonished the morning-glory at the bottom of the page looks as
it gazes upon its cousin the bindweed!
For the bindweeds, you must know, are like the bloodroots and mandrakes
and other wild flowers; they are natives of our Northern climate.
[Illustration: [Convolvulus]]
[Illustration: [Convolvulus]]
There are several kinds of bindweeds just as there are several kinds of
morning-glories; but they are all, morning-glories and bindweeds alike,
descended from some way-back convolvulus ancestor, just as you and your
cousins and your second cousins and your third cousins and your
fourteenth cousins are all descended from the same great, great, great,
way-back grandfather.
There is another member of the Convolvulus Family with which we are all
pretty well acquainted, and that is our little red-flowered cypress
vine. You remember it, with its feathery leaves which we train over
trellises in our flower gardens.
You would hardly think at first glance that it was a relative of the
morning-glory. But it is, as you would discover if you looked at it very
carefully and saw how much it is like a morning-glory in its way of
growing, in spite of appearances.
It comes to us from Mexico, and you could hardly expect a Mexican
convolvulus to be just like a South American one, the habits of the two
countries are so different, you know.
Why, you would hardly know your own relatives if they had been born and
brought up in South America for a few generations.
The next time you go to Mexico be sure and look out for the cypress
vine, which, for all I know, may be looked upon as just a common weed
there, as we look at thistles and dandelions here. We would think
thistles and dandelions beautiful flowers if we had to raise them in
gardens with a great deal of trouble. But because we have to dig them
out of our gardens and lawns we call them weeds and detest them.
Way down South, and also in some parts of Florida, there lives a lovely
convolvulus. It grows something like our morning-glories, only its
leaves are all sorts of shapes, heart-shaped and halberd-shaped and
angled, all together on the same vine sometimes.
Its blossoms are real flower queens, they are so large and white and
fragrant. They have a tube which is three or four inches long, and a
snowy border still larger. They are called _bona nox_, which you know
very well is the Latin for “good night.”
The reason they are called this is, they do not open in the morning at
all, but always at night.
People have them growing over their porches sometimes, and sometimes
call them “moonflowers.”
The long white buds are twisted tightly shut in the daytime, but as soon
as the sun sets, if you are watching, you will see something to astonish
and delight you. For see, the bud moves a little! Then, all at once, the
great white flower spreads out its corolla with a grace and serenity
that thrill you. Before your very eyes the bud unfolds, and you have
seen a flower blossom out! At the same moment a delicate and delightful
fragrance fills the air.
But why does it bloom at night you ask.
The morning-glory has a bright bell to call the bees, but the bees do
not fly at night. Does this large, fragrant white flower not care for
the bees? Does it not wish pollen from other flowers?
That it does; above all things it wants pollen, and that is why it has
opened this large, white, fragrant corolla.
See its tube, how long and deep. What bee could reach into _that_
nectary?
A humming bird might, but the humming birds are all tucked up on their
tiny perches sound asleep. They will never sip the nectar from those
large white moonflowers.
[Illustration: [Humming bird]]
But what am I saying? Here comes one now! Such a whirr of wings! Such a
dainty bird as poises before the large sweet flower! It thrusts in its
bill, but stay! that is not a bird’s bill finding its way to the bottom
of those deep-placed nectaries. It is a long, slender tube such as
butterflies have, and this is no bird, but a large night-flying moth.
These moths are heavier than butterflies and look very much like humming
birds when darting through the air.
But if you see one at rest you know at once it is no humming bird. When
the humming birds are darting about in the sunshine, these moths are
hidden beneath a leaf or in some other safe place.
Perhaps they fear some bird with a taste for moths will eat them if they
come out. Perhaps they love the quiet night. However that may be, as
soon as it is dusk they fly out. They are hungry after their sleep
through the long summer day, and dart about to find flowers that are
still open.
The morning-glories, we know, are closed, for they love the bees, but
the moonflowers are filling the air with perfume; their fragrance guides
the moths to the white flowers that shine out in the dim light.
Now you see why the moonflowers are white and why they are fragrant.
They wish to call these friendly night-moths to come and carry pollen
from flower to flower.
If they were red or purple the moths could not so easily see them, and
if they had no odor the moths could not smell them a long way off, and
so might not come close enough to find them.
So our fair Southern friend the moonflower loves the moths and not the
bees. Into its long white tube their long, slender tongues can easily
reach and find the nectar, and in taking it they brush the pollen
against their tongues or their faces, and when they go to another flower
it is rubbed against the stigma.
The sphinx moths are the fellows with long sucking tubes that fly in the
evening.
A good many members of the Convolvulus Family make us happy by their
beauty, but some of them do more than this. The sweet potato, for
instance, gives us something to eat. You know what it gives us, but
probably you did not know the sweet potato is a convolvulus and first
cousin to the morning-glory and moonflower, and that it has come to us
all the way from India.
Some say its home is in the East Indies too, and when you go there, if
you look in the right place, you may see it growing wild. I doubt if the
wild plant bears such big potatoes though; probably they are the result
of long cultivation.
[Illustration: SWEET POTATO VINE.]
It is also said that its home is in tropical America. Very likely it
belongs to all these places. Some plants have a way of living all over
the world at once.
How they managed to get separated so far is a problem we must try to
solve some day.
The sweet potato generally lies flat on the ground and sends out long
stems in all directions. Its leaves, as you can see, are more or less
like morning-glory and bindweed leaves. Its flowers are also like
morning-glories, though they are not so pretty. It has a habit of
storing up quantities of starch and sugar in its roots. It does this,
hoping to use the starch and sugar again as food in forming new shoots.
But sometimes we step in and disarrange all these fine plans, for we,
too, need starch and sugar as food, and we take the big sweet roots and
eat them.
People plant large fields of sweet potatoes, particularly in the South.
So next time you eat a sweet potato, remember it is one kind of
morning-glory which has given it to you.
The sweet potatoes are no relation whatever to our common potatoes; they
do not belong to the same family.
The sweet potato is not the only useful morning-glory. There is the
jalap, though if you have ever made its acquaintance you may differ from
me as to its value; for however useful it may be from the doctor’s point
of view, it certainly possesses properties which are quite the reverse
of agreeable.
It, too, forms large tubers, which it stores full of plant food, but it
so happens that this particular plant food is not fit for human food. We
put it to quite another use. In fact, jalap is used as a medicine. It
grows very luxuriantly at Jalapa, or, as the Mexicans spell it, Xalapa,
in Mexico, and that is the way it gets its name of jalap.
In spite of its very disagreeable taste and beneficial effect upon sick
people, the jalap is a lovely vine with beautiful deep pink flowers.
If you saw it growing along the eastern slopes of the Mexican mountains
you would never suspect it of being a medicine plant, and you _might_
not suspect it of being a convolvulus, since its flowers are flat
instead of tubular in form.
[Illustration: SCAMMONY.]
Several members of the Convolvulus Family have the same medicinal
properties as jalap, and one in particular, whose name is scammony, is
very highly esteemed.
It has an uncommonly bad taste, and its swollen roots are brought all
the way from Syria and Asia Minor, not because of their bad taste, but
because of their power as a medicine. The scammony, like the jalap, is a
pretty plant in spite of its bad-tasting, medicinal roots.
Most of the Convolvulaceæ have a milky, bitter juice,—even our pretty,
harmless morning-glories,—and in the jalap and scammony this seems to be
exaggerated in quality and quantity.
A few of the Convolvulaceæ manage to make woody stems and become shrubs
instead of vines.
Two of these live on the Canary Islands, and their sap, instead of being
nauseous and bad-smelling, has a delicate and delicious fragrance.
People take the wood from root and stems and press out the oil to be
used in making perfumery.
Perhaps you know the odor of oil of rhodium. Whenever you smell it you
are inhaling the fragrance from a Canary convolvulus.
It is a little surprising to find our convolvulus so widespread and so
really useful in different parts of the world; but there is another side
to the history of this highly respectable family. _Every_ family,
probably, has its black sheep, and not even the Convolvulaceæ can hope
to have all their relatives honest and useful or beautiful.
Still, one hates to speak of the dodders. They are in the world,
however, and they belong to the Convolvulus Family; there is no denying
that, however much one might like to. None of the Convolvulus Family
ever speak of them—at least I have never heard of their doing so.
As a rule, the members of the Convolvulus Family are aristocrats. They
have descended from a long line of plants that have gone on improving.
That is what makes an aristocrat in plant land,—to be descended from a
long line of plants that have _kept on improving_. Simply to belong to
an old family does not count for much in the plant world, unless that
old family has kept on doing something to improve itself.
We know the Convolvulaceæ are aristocrats for one thing by their tubular
corollas; it took good, wide-awake ancestors to make corollas without
separate petals anyway, and particularly tubular ones. Then their color
tells their history. They are often blue or purple, which is a _very_
aristocratic color among flowers. Instead of being blue-blooded, they
are blue-colored.
The moonflower is not blue, but think what a tube it has and what a
large fine corolla; and then think, too, that it has learned to bloom at
night so as to get fertilized by the moths, and _that_ is a very
aristocratic thing to do, I assure you.
If a flower blooms at night it is as great an honor as to wear a blue
corolla. For you see it has taken as much growth in the direction of
progress to acquire the night-blooming habit as to acquire a blue
corolla.
The cypress vine has a red corolla, which is a good color, but not quite
as advanced as blue. You see, in the beginning of the world flowers were
yellow; then some became white, then pink. Probably red was the next
step, then came purple, and last of all blue.
But the cypress vine has very finely divided leaves, as you remember,
and in that it is ahead of the morning-glories. For in the beginning of
the world, we are told, leaves were not divided, and only after a long
time did some plants learn to divide them, and so increase their
usefulness as leaves.
But when we come to the dodders, they have no leaves at all. The reason
for this is, they do no work for themselves. The green leaves, as you
know, prepare the food for the plant and work very hard to do it. If the
dodders have no leaves, where do they get their food? That is just the
trouble. They make other plants give it to them. They are very much like
tramps, going about and living on other people. Only they are worse than
tramps, for they do not say, “Please give me something to eat. I am
hungry and want some starch and nitrogen compounds.” They do nothing of
the sort. They catch hold of another plant and take away its juices
without leave or license. So you see they are really thieves and
robbers, these rascally dodders. No wonder the morning-glories are not
proud of them. Not that the dodders care. It is a question whether they
even know they are related to the morning-glories.
They think of little but how to get something to eat out of other
people.
They begin their shameful career from the very seed. Instead of
sprouting in the spring with the other seeds, they lie still until all
the other plants have gone out of their seeds and are at work making
green leaves and storing their stems with plant juices.
[Illustration: [Dodder]]
[Illustration: [Dodder]]
Then Dodder the Robber comes out. But instead of sending down a root and
up a stem like other seeds, he just pushes out a little thread-like
body, which fastens into the ground. You might think this an honest
little root going down into the ground if you did not know friend
Dodder. But it is no root; it does not suck up juices from the earth: it
simply anchors the little robber so he cannot be blown away. Now the
thread-like body grows larger and sticks up out of the ground, carrying
the seed-coat with it. The seed-coat is packed with food which the
parent plant stored away there. The young dodder nourishes itself with
this food until it is all gone; then it casts off the empty seed-coat,
and behold young Dodder ready for the fray. What he very much wants at
this time is a fresh young twig to cling to and suck the juice out of.
If nothing of the sort is handy he is in a bad way, for he is too
helpless to do anything for himself. He has no green leaves, and does
not know how to make any, and without green leaves he cannot get a thing
to eat. Poor Dodder! after all, it is not wholly his fault he is such a
good-for-nothing specimen of planthood. You see he came from bad stock.
His parents were like this before him, and no one has ever taught him
any better. Well, there he lies, as helpless a plant as you can imagine.
But just let a green shoot come within reach! _Then_ you will see! He
twists around it without stopping to say “by your leave.” He pierces it
with little suckers that draw out its juices. Now Dodder is all right.
He has plenty of food without the trouble of making a bit of it himself.
[Illustration: [Dodder]]
And then how he grows! Up the poor weed he twines, a slender yellow stem
that looks as much like yellow yarn as anything else. Around and around
he turns; he has no leaves to make, only useless little scales that show
where long ago his ancestors once had honest leaves.
You will sometimes find the weeds in a damp place a perfect tangle of
dodder vines, so that nothing else is to be seen. They cover the weeds,
sucking out their juices and smothering them. And when the time comes
the dodder breaks out into innumerable bunches of flowers, which grow at
short distances along the yellow stems. These flowers are small and
generally white, and clustered so close together that they form a sort
of knot or rosette on the stem.
You would never imagine to look at them that they belonged to our
Morning-Glory Family.
Their corollas are more or less cleft, being grown together only at the
base.
Sometimes the flowers are orange-colored or reddish, but they do not
seem to attract the insects much. Nor do they care, for they can easily
fertilize themselves, the anthers and stigmas being so close together.
They have none of the ingenious arrangements for cross-fertilization
that characterize their more fortunate relatives. They are thoroughly
degraded plants.
There lives a dodder in Europe which grows upon flax, and so does damage
to the flax fields, and I am sorry to say this little pest has tramped
his way across the ocean into _our_ flax fields. We do not thank Europe
at all for sending us such an emigrant.
As the dodders have nothing to do but suck the juices of other plants
and make seeds out of them, you may be sure they set any quantity of
seeds to keep up the disreputable race of dodders.
Yet, in spite of the dodders, dear Convolvulus People, let us say to
you, as our beloved old Rip Van Winkle says to us, “May you live long
and prosper, and all your family!”
[Illustration: [Convolvulus]]
[Illustration: Stories About the Geranium Family]