Part 43 (1/2)
The ANNUAL SOW-THISTLE or HARE'S LETTUCE (S. oleraceus), its smaller, pale yellow flower-heads, with smooth involucres more closely grouped, now occupies our fields and waste places with the a.s.surance of a native. Honeybees chiefly, but many other bees, wasps, brilliant little flower-flies (Syrphidae), and b.u.t.terflies among other winged visitors which alight on the flowers, from May to November, are responsible for the copious, soft, fine, white-plumed seeds that the winds waft away to fresh colonizing ground. The leaves clasp the stem by deep ear-like or arrow-shaped lobes, or the large lower ones are on petioles, lyrate-pinnatifid, the terminal division commonly large and triangular; the margins all toothed. Frugal European peasants use them as a potherb or salad. One of the plant's common folk-names in the Old World is hare's palace. According to the ”Grete Herbale,” if ”the hare come under it, he is sure no beast can touch hym!' That was the spot Brer Rabbit was looking for when Brer Fox lay low! Another early writer declares that ”when hares are overcome with heat they eat of an herb called hare's-lettuce, hare's-house, hare's-palace; and there is no disease in this beast the cure whereof she does not seek for in this herb.” Who has detected our cottontails nibbling the succulent leaves?
TALL or WILD LETTUCE; WILD OPIUM (Lactuca Canadensis) Chicory family
Flower-heads - Numerous small, about 1/4 in. across, involucre cylindric, rays pale yellow; followed by abundant, soft, bright white pappus; the heads growing in loose, branching, terminal cl.u.s.ters. Stem: Smooth, 3 to 10 ft. high, leafy up to the flower panicle; juice milky. Leaves: Upper ones lance shaped; lower ones often 1 ft. long, wavy-lobed, often pinnatifid, taper pointed, narrowed into flat petioles.
Preferred Habitat - Moist, open ground; roadsides.
Flowering Season - June-November.
Distribution - Georgia, westward to Arkansas, north to the British Possessions.
Few gardeners allow the table lettuce (sativa) to go to seed but as it is next of kin to this common wayside weed, it bears a strong likeness to it in the loose, narrow panicles of cream-colored flowers, followed by more charming, bright white little pompons. Where the garden varieties originated, or what they were, n.o.body knows. Herodotus says lettuce was eaten as a salad in 550 B.C.; in Pliny's time it was cultivated, and even blanched, so as to be had at all seasons of the year by the Romans. Among the privy-purse expenses of Henry VIII is a reward to a certain gardener for bringing ”lettuze” and cherries to Hampton Court. Quaint old Parkinson, enumerating ”the vertues of the lettice,” says, ”They all cool a hot and fainting stomache.”
When the milky juice has been thickened (lactucarium), it is sometimes used as a subst.i.tute for opium by regular pract.i.tioners - a fluid employed by the plants themselves, it is thought, to discourage creatures from feasting at their expense (see milkweed). Certain caterpillars, however, eat the leaves readily; but offer lettuce or poppy foliage to grazing cattle, and they will go without food rather than touch it.
”What's one man's poison, Signor, Is another's meat or drink.”
Rabbits, for example, have been fed on the deadly nightshade for a week without injury.
The HAIRY or RED WILD LETTUCE (L. hirsuta), similar to the preceding, but often with dark reddish stem, peduncles, and tiny flower-cups, the ray florets varying from yellow to pale reddish or purplish, has longer leaves, deeply cut or lobed almost to the wide midrib. After what we learned when studying the barberry and the p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus, for example, about plants that choose to live in dry soil, it is not surprising to find that this is a lower, less leafy, and more hairy plant than the moisture-loving tall lettuce.
An European immigrant, naturalized here but recently, the p.r.i.c.kLY LETTUCE (L. Scariola) has nevertheless made itself so very much at home in a short time that it has already become a troublesome weed from New England to Pennsylvania, westward to Minnesota and Missouri. But when we calculate that every plant produces over eight thousand fluffy white-winged seeds on its narrow panicle, ready to sail away on the first breeze, no wonder so well endowed and prolific an invader marches triumphantly across continents.
The long, pale green, spiny-margined, milky leaves, with stiff p.r.i.c.kles on the midrib beneath, are doubly protected against insect borers and grazing cattle.
”Look at this delicate plant that lifts its head from the meadow; See how its leaves all point to the North as true as the magnet.”
While Longfellow must have had the coa.r.s.e-growing, yellow-flowered, daisy-like PRAIRIE ROSIN-WEED (Silphium laciniatum) in mind when he wrote this stanza of ”Evangeline,”
his lines apply with more exactness to the delicate p.r.i.c.kly lettuce, our eastern compa.s.s plant. Not until 1895 did Professor J. C. Arthur discover that when the garden lettuce is allowed to flower, its stem leaves also exhibit polarity. The great lower leaves of the rosin-weed, which stand nearly vertical, with their faces to the east and west, and their edges to the north and south, have directed many a traveler, not from Acadia only, across the prairie until it has earned the t.i.tles pilot-weed, compa.s.s or polar plant. Various theories have been advanced to account for the curious phenomenon, some claiming that the leaves contained sufficient iron to reader them magnetic - a theory promptly exploded by chemical a.n.a.lysis. Others supposed that the resinous character of the leaves made them susceptible to magnetic influence; but as rosin is a non-conductor of electricity, of course this hypothesis likewise proved untenable.
At last Dr. Asa Gray brought forward the only sensible explanation: inasmuch as both surfaces of the rosin-weed leaf are essentially alike, there being very nearly as many stomata on the upper side as on the under, both surfaces are equally sensitive to sunlight; therefore the leaf twists on its petiole until both sides share it as equally as is possible. While the polarity of the p.r.i.c.kly lettuce leaves is by no means so marked, Dr. Gray's theory about the rosin-weed may be applied to them as well.
ORANGE or TAWNY HAWKWEED; GOLDEN MOUSE-EAR HAWKWEED; DEVIL'S PAINT-BRUSH (Hieracium aurantiac.u.m) Chicory family
Flower-beads - Reddish orange; 1 in. across or less, the 5-toothed rays overlapping in several series; several heads on short peduncles in a terminal cl.u.s.ter. Stem: Usually leafless, or with 1 to 2 small sessile leaves; 6 to 20 in. high, slender, hairy, from a tuft of hairy, spatulate, or oblong leaves at the base.
Preferred Habitat - Fields, woods, roadsides, dry places.
Flowering Season - June-September.
Distribution - Pennsylvania and Middle States northward into British Possessions.
Peculiar reddish-orange disks, similar in shade to the b.u.t.terfly weed's umbels, attract our eyes no less than those of the bees, flies, and b.u.t.terflies for whom such splendor was designed. After cross-fertilization has been effected, chiefly through the agency of the smaller bees, a single row of slender, brownish, persistent bristles attached to the seeds transforms the head into the ”devil's paint-brush.” Another popular t.i.tle in England, from whence the plant originally came, is Grimm the Collier. All the plants in this genus take their name from hierax = a hawk, because people in the old country once thought that birds of prey swooped earthward to sharpen their eyesight with leaves of the hawkweed, hawkbit, or speerhawk, as they are variously called.
Transplanted into the garden, the orange hawkweed forms a spreading ma.s.s of unusual, splendid color.
The RATTLESNAKE-WEED, EARLY or VEIN-LEAF HAWKWEED, SNAKE or POOR ROBIN'S PLANTAIN (H. venosum), with flower-heads only about half an inch across, sends up a smooth, slender stem, paniculately branched above, to display the numerous dandelion-yellow disks as early as May, although October is not too late to find this generous bloomer in pine woodlands, dry thickets, and sandy soil.
Purplish-veined oval leaves, more or less hairy, that spread in a tuft next the ground, are probably as efficacious in curing snakebites as those of the rattlesnake plantain (q.v.). When a credulous generation believed that the Creator had indicated with some sign on each plant the special use for which each was intended, many leaves were found to have veinings suggesting the marks on a snake's body; therefore, by simple reasoning, they must extract venom. How delightful is faith cure!
Unlike the preceding, the CANADA HAWKWEED (H. Canadense), lacks a basal tuft at flowering time, but its firm stem, that may be any height from one to five feet, is amply furnished with oblong to lance-shaped leaves seated on it, their midrib prominent, the margins sparingly but sharply toothed. In dry, open woods and thickets, and along shady roadsides, its loosely cl.u.s.tered heads of clear yellow, about one inch across, are displayed from July to September; and later the copious brown bristles remain for sparrows to peck at.
The ROUGH HAWKWEED (H. scabrum), with a stout, stiff stem crowned with a narrow branching cl.u.s.ter of small yellow flower-heads on dark bristly peduncles, also lacks a basal tuft at flowering time. Its hairy oblong leaves are seated on the rigid stem. In dry, open places, clearings, and woodlands from Nova Scotia to Georgia, and westward to Nebraska, it blooms from July to September.
More slender and sprightly is the HAIRY HAWKWEED (H. Gronovii), common in sterile soil from Ma.s.sachusetts and Illinois to the Gulf States. The basal leaves and lower part of the stiff stem, especially, are hairy, not to allow too free transpiration of precious moisture.
GOLDEN ASTER (Chrysopsis Mariana) Thistle family
Plower-heads - Composite, yellow, 1 in. wide or less, a few corymbed flowers on glandular stalks; each composed of perfect tubular disk florets surrounded by pistillate ray florets the involucre campanulate, its narrow bracts overlapping in several series. Stem: Stout, silky-hairy when young, nearly smooth later, 1 to 2 1/2 ft. tall. Leaves: Alternate, oblong to spatulate, entire.