Wild Flowers / Natures Garden | Page 4

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