Etext prepared by Gerry Rising.
WILD FLOWERS.
An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors
By Neltje Blanchan
Surely a foreword of explanation is called for from one who hasthe temerity to offer a surfeited public still another book onwild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almost everyblossom in the world is everything it is because of its necessityto 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 selectionby that special insect upon which each depends more or lessabsolutely for help in perpetuating its species - it seems fullytime that the vitally important and interesting relationshipexisting between our common wild flowers and their wingedbenefactors should be presented in a popular book.
Is it enough to know merely the name of the flower you meet inthe meadow? The blossom has an inner meaning, hopes and fearsthat inspire its brief existence, a scheme of salvation for itsspecies in the struggle for survival that it has been slowlyperfecting with some insect's help through the ages. It is not apassive thing to be admired by human eyes, nor does it waste itssweetness on the desert air. It is a sentient being, impelled toact intelligently through the same strong desires that animateus, and endowed with certain powers differing only in degree, butnot in kind, from those of the animal creation. Desire evercreates form.
Do you doubt it? Then study the mechanism of one of our commonorchids or milkweeds that are adjusted with such marvelousdelicacy to the length of a bee's tongue or of a butterfly's leg;learn why so many flowers have sticky calices or protectivehairs; why the skunk cabbage, purple trillium, and carrion floweremit a fetid odor while other flowers, especially the white orpale yellow night bloomers, charm with their delicious breath;see if you cannot discover why the immigrant daisy alreadywhitens our fields with descendants as numerous as the sands ofthe seashore, whereas you may tramp a whole day without finding asingle native ladies' slipper. What of the sundew that not onlycatches insects, but secretes gastric juice to digest them? Whatof the bladderwort, in whose inflated traps tiny crustaceans areimprisoned, 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 visitorchoosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinitepains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlesslyare pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitiousflowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreedingthrough fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove theoperation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they sendseeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studiedwith profit by Anglo-Saxon expansionists. Do vice and virtueexist side by side in the vegetable world also? Yes, and everysinner is branded as surely as was Cain. The dodder, Indian pipe,broomrape and beech-drops wear the floral equivalent of thestriped suit and the shaved head. Although claiming mostrespectable and exalted kinsfolk, they are degenerates not farabove the fungi. In short, this is a universe that we live in;and all that share the One Life are one in essence, for naturallaw is spiritual law. "Through Nature to God," flowers show a wayto the scientist lacking faith.
Although it has been stated by evolutionists for many years thatin order to know the flowers, their insect relationships must