If he did but know it, it keeps closed for his special benefit, having no fringes or hairs to entangle the feet of crawling pilferers, and no better way of protecting its nectar from rain and marauding butterflies that are not adapted to its needs.But he is a powerful fellow.Watch him alight on a cluster of blossoms, select the younger, nectar-bearing ones, that are distinctly marked white against a light-blue background at the mouth of the corolla for his special guidance.Old flowers from which the nectar has been removed turn deep reddish purple, and the white pathfinders become indistinct.With some difficulty, it is true, the bumblebee (B.Americanorum) thrusts his tongue through the valve of the chosen flower where the five plaited lobes overlap one another; then he pushes with all his might until his head having passed the entrance most of his body follows, leaving only his hind legs and the tip of his abdomen sticking out as he makes the circuit.He has much sense as well as muscle, and does not risk imprisonment in what must prove a tomb by a total and unnecessary disappearance within the bottle.
Presently he backs out, brushes the pollen from his head and thorax into his baskets, and is off to fertilize an older, stigmatic flower with the few grains of quickening dust that must remain on his velvety head.
WILD BLUE PHLOX
(Phlox divaricata) Phlox family Flowers - Pale lilac blue, slightly fragrant, borne on sticky pedicels, in loose, spreading clusters.Calyx with 5 long, sharp teeth.Corolla of 5 flat lobes, indented like the top of a heart, and united into a slender tube; 5 unequal, straight, short stamens in corolla tube; 1 pistil with 3 stigmas.Stem: to 2 ft.
high, finely coated with sticky hairs above, erect or spreading, and producing leafy shoots from base.Leaves: Of flowering stem -opposite, oblong, tapering to a point; of sterile shoots - oblong or egg-shaped, not pointed, 1 to 2 in.long.
Preferred habitat - Moist, rocky woods.
Flowering Season - April-June.
Distribution - Eastern Canada to Florida, Minnesota to Arkansas.
The merest novice can have no difficulty in naming the flower whose wild and cultivated relations abound throughout North America, the almost exclusive home of the genus, although it is to European horticulturists, as usual the first to see the possibilities in our native flowers, that we owe the gay hybrids in our gardens.Mr.Drummond, a collector from the Botanical Society of Glasgow, early in the thirties sent home the seeds of a species from Texas, which became the ancestor of the gorgeous annuals, the Drummond phloxes of commerce today; and although he died of fever in Cuba before the plants became generally known, not even his kinsman, the author of "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," has done more to immortalize the family name.
While the wild blue phlox is sometimes cultivated, it is the GARDEN PHLOX (P.paniculata), common in woods and thickets from Pennsylvania to Illinois and southward, that under a gardener's care bears the large terminal clusters of purple, magenta, crimson, pink, and white flowers abundant in old-fashioned, hardy borders.From these it has escaped so freely in many sections of the North and East as to be counted among the local wildflowers.
Unless the young offshoots are separated from the parent and given a nook of their own, the flower quickly reverts to the original type.European cultivators claim that the most brilliant colors are obtained by crossing annual with perennial phloxes.
WILD SWEET WILLIAM (P.maculata), another perennial much sought by cultivators, loves the moisture of low woods and the neighborhood of streams in the Middle and Western States when it is free to choose its habitat; but it, too, has so freely escaped from gardens farther north into dry and dusty roadsides, that anyone who has passed the ruins of Hawthorne's little red cottage at Lenox, for example, and seen the way his wife's clump of white phlox under his study window has spread to cover an acre of hillside, would suppose it to be luxuriating in its favorite locality.This variety of the species (var.Candida) lacks the purplish flecks on stem and lower leaves responsible for the specific name of the type.Pinkish purple or pink blossoms are borne in a rather narrow, elongated panicle on the typical Sweet William.
Most members of the phlox family resort to the trick of coating the upper stem and the peduncles immediately below the flowers with a sticky secretion in which crawling insects, intent on pilfering sweets, meet their death, just as birds are caught on limed twigs.Butterflies, for whom phloxes have narrowed their tubes to the exclusion of most other insects, are their benefactors; but long-tongued bees and flies often seek their nectar.Indeed, the number of strictly butterfly-flowers is surprisingly small.
VIRGINIA COWSLIP; TREE or SMOOTH LUNGWORT; BLUE-BELLS(Mertensia Virginica) Borage family Flowers - Pinkish in bud, afterward purplish blue, fading to light blue; about 1 in.long, tubular, funnel form, the tube of corolla not crested; spreading or hanging on slender pedicels in showy, loose clusters at end of smooth stem from 1 to 2 ft.high;stamens 5, inserted on corolla; 1 pistil; ovary of 4 divisions.
Leaves: Large, entire, alternate, veiny, oblong or obovate, the upper ones seated on stem; lower very large ones diminishing toward base into long petioles; at first rich, dark purple, afterward pale bluish gray.Fruit: 4 seed-like little nuts, leathery, wrinkled when mature.
Preferred Habitat - Alluvial ground, low meadows, and along streams.
Flowering Season - March-May.
Distribution - Southern Canada to South Carolina and Kansas, west to Nebraska; most abundant in middle West.