_Lactuca canadensis_
_Flower-heads_--Numerous, small, about 1/4 in. across, involucre,
cylindric, rays pale yellow; followed by abundant, soft, bright white
pappus; the heads growing in loose, branching, terminal clusters.
_Stem:_ Smooth, 3 to 10 ft. high, leafy up to the flower panicle;
juice milky. _Leaves:_ Upper ones lance-shaped; lower ones often 1
ft. long, wavy-lobed, often pinnatifid, taper pointed, narrowed into
flat petioles.
_Preferred Habitat_--Moist, open ground; roadsides.
_Flowering Season_--June-November.
_Distribution_--Georgia, westward to Arkansas, north to the British
Possessions.
Few gardeners allow the table lettuce (_sativa_) to go to seed; but as
it is next of kin to this common wayside weed, it bears a strong
likeness to it in the loose, narrow panicles of cream-colored flowers,
followed by more charming, bright, white little pompons. Where the
garden varieties originated, or what they were, nobody knows. Herodotus
says lettuce was eaten as a salad in 550 B.C.; in Pliny’s time it was
cultivated, and even blanched, so as to be had at all seasons of the
year by the Romans. Among the privy-purse expenses of Henry VIII is a
reward to a certain gardener for bringing “lettuze” and cherries to
Hampton Court. Quaint old Parkinson, enumerating “the vertues of the
lettice,” says, “They all cool a hot and fainting stomache.” When the
milky juice has been thickened (_lactucarium_), it is sometimes used as
a substitute for opium by regular practitioners--a fluid employed by the
plants themselves, it is thought, to discourage creatures from feasting
at their expense. Certain caterpillars, however, eat the leaves readily;
but offer lettuce or poppy foliage to grazing cattle, and they will go
without food rather than touch it.
“What’s one man’s poison, Signer,
Is another’s meat or drink.”
Rabbits, for example, have been fed on the deadly nightshade for a week
without injury.
Orange or Tawny Hawkweed; Golden Mouse-ear Hawkweed; Devil’s
Paint-brush
_Hieracium aurantiacum_
_Flower-heads_--Reddish orange; 1 in. across or less, the 5-toothed rays
overlapping in several series; several heads on short peduncles in a
terminal cluster. _Stem_: Usually leafless, or with 1 to 2 small sessile
leaves; 6 to 20 in. high, slender, hairy, from a tuft of hairy,
spatulate, or oblong leaves at the base.
_Preferred Habitat_--Fields, woods, roadsides, dry places.
_Flowering Season_--June-September.
_Distribution_--Pennsylvania and Middle states northward into British
Possessions.
A popular title in England, from whence the plant originally came, is
Grimm the Collier. All the plants in this genus take their name from
_hierax_--a hawk, because people in the old country once thought that
birds of prey swooped earthward to sharpen their eyesight with leaves of
the hawkweed, hawkbit, or speerhawk, as they are variously called.
Transplanted into the garden, the orange hawkweed forms a spreading mass
of unusual, splendid color.
The Rattlesnake-weed, Early or Vein-leaf Hawkweed, Snake or Poor Robin’s
Plantain (_H. venosum_), with flower-heads only about half an inch
across, sends up a smooth, slender stem, paniculately branched above, to
display the numerous dandelion-yellow disks as early as May, although
October is not too late to find this generous bloomer in pine woodlands,
dry thickets, and sandy soil. Purplish-veined oval leaves, more or less
hairy, that spread in a tuft next the ground, are probably as
efficacious in curing shake bites as those of the Rattlesnake Plantain.
When a credulous generation believed that the Creator had indicated with
some sign on each plant the special use for which each was intended,
many leaves were found to have veinings suggesting the marks on a
snake’s body; therefore, by simple reasoning, they must extract venom.
How delightful is faith cure!