Colorless in every part, waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes rise like a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them well.Ghoulish parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted roots prey either on the juices of living plants or on the decaying matter of dead ones, how weirdly beautiful and decorative, they are! The strange plant grows also in Japan, and one can readily imagine how fascinated the native artists must be by its chaste charms.
Yet to one who can read the faces of flowers, as it were, it stands a branded sinner.Doubtless its ancestors were industrious, honest creatures, seeking their food in the soil, and digesting it with the help of leaves filled with good green matter (chlorophyll) on which virtuous vegetable life depends;but some ancestral knave elected to live by piracy, to drain the already digested food of its neighbors; so the Indian pipe gradually lost the use of parts for which it had need no longer, until we find it today without color and its leaves degenerated into mere scaly bracts.Nature has manifold ways of illustrating the parable of the ten pieces of money.Spiritual law is natural law: "From him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away." Among plants as among souls, there are all degrees of backsliders.The foxglove, which is guilty of only sly, petty larceny, wears not the equivalent of the striped suit and the shaved head; nor does the mistletoe, which steals crude food from the tree, but still digests it itself, and is therefore only a dingy yellowish green.Such plants, however, as the broomrape, pinesap, beechdrops, the Indian pipe, and the dodder - which marks the lowest stage of degradation of them all - appear among their race branded with the mark of crime as surely as was Cain.
No wonder this degenerate hangs its head; no wonder it grows black with shame on being picked, as if its wickedness were only just then discovered! To think that a plant related on one side to many of the loveliest flowers in Nature's garden- - the azaleas, laurels, rhododendrons, and the bonny heather - and on the other side to the modest but no less charming wintergreen tribe, should have fallen from grace to such a depth! Its scientific name, meaning a flower once turned, describes it during only a part of its career.When the minute, innumerable seeds begin to form, it proudly raises its head erect, as if conscious that it had performed the one righteous act of its life.
LABRADOR TEA
(Ledum Groenlandicum; L.latifolium of Gray) Heath family Flowers - White, 5-parted, 1/2 in.across or less, numerous, borne in terminal, umbellate clusters rising from scaly, sticky bud-bracts.Stem: A compact shrub 1 to 4 ft.high, resinous, the twigs woolly-hairy.Leaves: Alternate, thick, evergreen, oblong, obtuse, small, dull above, rusty-woolly beneath, the margins curled.
Preferred Habitat - Swamps, bogs, wet mountain woods.Flowering Season - May-June.
Distribution - Greenland to Pennsylvania, west to Wisconsin.
Whoever has used the homeopathic lotion distilled from the leaves of Ledum palustre, a similar species found at the far North, knows the tea-like fragrance given forth by the leaves of this common shrub when crushed in a warm hand.But because the homeopathists claim that like is cured by like, are we to assume that these little bushes, both of which afford a soothing lotion, also irritate and poison? It may be; for they are next of kin to the azaleas, laurels, and rhododendrons, known to be injurious since Xenophon's day.At the end of May, when the Labrador tea is white with abundant flower clusters, one cannot but wonder why so desirable an acquisition is never seen in men's gardens here among its relatives.Over a hundred years ago the dense, compact little shrub was taken to England to adorn sunny bog gardens on fine estates.Doubtless the leaves have woolly mats underneath for the reason given in reference to the Steeple-bush.
WILD ROSEMARY; MARCH HOLY ROSE; WATER ANDROMEDA; MOORWORT(Andromeda Polifolia) Heath family Flowers - White or pink-tinted, small, round, tubular, 5-toothed at the tip; drooping from curved footstalks in few-flowered terminal umbels.Calyx deeply 5-parted; 10 bearded stamens; style like a column.Stem: A sparingly branched, dwarf shrub, 6 in.to 3 ft.tall.Leaves: Linear to lance-shape, evergreen, dark and glossy above, with a prominent white bloom underneath, the margins curled.
Preferred Habitat - Cool bogs, wet places.
Flowering Season - May-June.
Distribution - Pennsylvania and Michigan, far northward.
Only a delightfully imaginative optimist like Linnaeus could feel the enthusiasm he expended on this dwarf shrub, with its little, white, heath-like flowers, which most of us consider rather insignificant, if the truth be told.But then the blossoms he found in Lapland must have been much pinker than any seen in American swamps, since they reminded him of "a fine female complexion.""This plant is always fixed on some little turfy hillock in the midst of the swamps," he wrote, "just as Andromeda herself was chained to a rock in the sea, which bathed her feet as the fresh water does the roots of this plant....As the distressed virgin cast down her blushing face through excessive affliction, so does this rosy-colored flower hang its head, growing paler and paler till it withers away." Under the old go-as-you-please method of applying scientific names, most of this shrub's relatives shared with it the name of the fair maid whom Perseus rescued from the dragons.
The beautiful, low-growing STAGGERBUSH (Pieris Mariana) has its small, cylindric, five-parted, white or pink-tinted flowers clustered at intervals along one side of the upright, nearly leafless, smooth, dark-dotted branches of the preceding year.