Wild Flowers / Natures Garden | Page 5

feast now here, now there. In spite of Sprengel's most
patient and scientific research, that shed great light on the theory of
natural selection a half century before Darwin advanced it, he never
knew that flowers are nearly always sterile to pollen of another species
when carried to them on the bodies of insect visitors, or that
cross-pollenized blossoms defeat the self-pollinated ones in the struggle
for survival. These facts Darwin proved in endless experiments.
Because bees depend absolutely upon flowers, not only for their own
food but for that of future generations for whom they labor; because
they are the most diligent of all visitors, and are rarely diverted from
one species of flower to another while on their rounds collecting, as
they must, both nectar and pollen, it follows they are the most
important fertilizing agents. It is estimated that, should they perish,
more than half the flowers in the world would be exterminated with
them! Australian farmers imported clover from Europe, and although
they had luxuriant fields of it, no seed was set for next year's planting,
because they had failed to import the bumblebee. After his arrival, their
loss was speedily made good.
Ages before men cultivated gardens, they had tiny helpers they knew
not of. Gardeners win all the glory of producing a Lawson pink or a
new chrysanthemum; but only for a few seasons do they select,
hybridize, according to their own rules of taste. They take up the work
where insects left it off after countless centuries of toil. Thus it is to the
night-flying moth, long of tongue, keen of scent, that we are indebted
for the deep, white, fragrant Easter lily, for example, and not to the
florist; albeit the moth is in his turn indebted to the lily for the length of
his tongue and his keen nerves: neither could have advanced without
the other. What long vistas through the ages of creation does not this
interdependence of flowers and insects open!
Over five hundred flowers in this book have been classified according

to color, because it is believed that the novice, with no knowledge of
botany whatever, can most readily identify the specimen found afield
by this method, which has the added advantage of being the simple one
adopted by the higher insects ages before books were written.
Technicalities have been avoided in the text wherever possible, not to
discourage the beginner from entering upon one of the most enjoyable
and elevating branches of Nature study. The scientific names and
classification follow that method adopted by the International Botanical
Congress which has now superseded all others; nevertheless the titles
employed by Gray, with which older botanists in this country are
familiar, are also indicated where they differ from the new
nomenclature.
NELTJE BLANCHAN, New York, March, 1900
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface List of Illustrations Blue to Purple Flowers Magenta to Pink
Flowers White and Greenish Flowers Yellow and Orange Flowers Red
and Indefinites Appendices: Fragrant Flowers or Leaves Unpleasantly
Scented Plants and Shrubs Conspicuous in Fruit Plant Families
Represented
"Let us content ourselves no longer with being mere 'botanists' -
historians of structural facts. The flowers are not mere comely or
curious vegetable creations, with colors, odors, petals, stamens and
innumerable technical attributes. The wonted insight alike of scientist,
philosopher, theologian, and dreamer is now repudiated in the new
revelation. Beauty is not 'its own excuse for being,' nor was fragrance
ever 'wasted on the desert air.' The seer has at last heard and interpreted
the voice in the wilderness. The flower is no longer a simple passive
victim in the busy bee's sweet pillage, but rather a conscious being,
with hopes, aspirations and companionships. The insect is its
counterpart. Its fragrance is but a perfumed whisper of welcome, its
color is as the wooing blush and rosy lip, its portals are decked for his
coming, and its sweet hospitalities humored to his tarrying; and as it
speeds its parting affinity, rests content that its life's consummation has
been fulfilled." - William Hamilton Gibson.

"I often think, when working over my plants, of what Linnaeus once
said of the unfolding of a blossom: 'I saw God in His glory passing near
me, and bowed my head in worship.' The scientific aspect of the same
thought has been put into words by Tennyson:
'Flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you
here, root and all in my hand Little flower, - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and
man is.'
No deeper thought was ever uttered by poet. For in this world of plants,
which, with its magician, chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, is
ceaselessly at work bringing life out of death,