Wild Flowers / Natures Garden | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Gerry Rising.

WILD FLOWERS. An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and
Their Insect Visitors
By Neltje Blanchan

PREFACE
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