We may know the name of every tree near our home; we may recognise each
blossom in the field, every weed by the wayside; yet we should be
astonished to be told that there are hundreds of plants--many of them of
exquisite beauty--which we have overlooked in very sight of our doorstep.
What of the green film which is drawn over every moist tree-trunk or
shaded wall, or of the emerald film which coats the water of the pond's
edge? Or the gray lichens painting the rocks and logs, toning down the
shingles; the toadstools which, like pale vegetable ghosts, spring up in a
night from the turf; or the sombre puff balls which seem dead from their
birth?
The moulds which cover bread and cheese with a delicate tracery of
filaments and raise on high their tiny balls of spores are as worthy to be
called a plant growth as are the great oaks which shade our houses. The
rusts and mildews and blights which destroy our fruit all have their
beauty of growth and fruition when we examine them through a lens, and the
yeast by which flour and water is made to rise into the porous, spongy
dough is just as truly a plant as is the geranium blossoming at the
kitchen window.
If we wonder at the fierce struggle for existence which allows only a few
out of the many seeds of a maple or thistle to germinate and grow up, how
can we realise the obstacles with which these lowly plants have to
contend? A weed in the garden may produce from one to ten thousand seeds,
and one of our rarest ferns scatters in a single season over fifty
millions spores; while from the larger puff-balls come clouds of
unnumbered millions of spores, blowing to the ends of the earth; yet we
may search for days without finding one full-grown individual.
All the assemblage of mushrooms and toadstools,--although the most deadly
may flaunt bright hues of scarlet and yellow,--yet lack the healthy green
of ordinary plants. This is due to the fact that they have become brown
parasites or scavengers, and instead of transmuting heat and moisture and
the salts of the earth into tissue by means of the pleasant-hued
chlorophyll, these sylvan ghosts subsist upon the sap of roots or the
tissues of decaying wood. Emancipated from the normal life of the higher
plants, even flowers have been denied them and their fruit is but a cloud
of brown dust,--each mote a simple cell.
But what of the delicate Indian pipe which gleams out from the darkest
aisles of the forest? If we lift up its hanging head we will find a
perfect flower, and its secret is discovered. Traitor to its kind, it has
dropped from the ranks of the laurels, the heather, and the jolly little
wintergreens to the colourless life of a parasite,--hobnobbing with
clammy toadstools and slimy lichens. Its common names are all
appropriate,--ice-plant, ghost-flower, corpse-plant.
Nevertheless it is a delicately beautiful creation, and we have no right
to apply our human standards of ethics to these children of the wild,
whose only chance of life is to seize every opportunity,--to make use of
each hint of easier existence.
We have excellent descriptions and classifications of mushrooms and
toadstools, but of the actual life of these organisms, of the conditions
of their growth, little is known. Some of the most hideous are delicious
to our palate, some of the most beautiful are certain death. The splendid
red and yellow amanita, which lights up a dark spot in the woods like some
flowering orchid, is a veritable trap of death. Though human beings have
learned the fatal lesson and leave it alone, the poor flies in the woods
are ever deceived by its brightness, or odour, and a circle of their
bodies upon the ground shows the result of their ignorance.