Part 1

HOW TO KNOW THE WILD FLOWERS =A Guide= TO THE NAMES, HAUNTS, AND HABITS OF OUR COMMON WILD FLOWERS

MRS. WILLIAM STARR DANA

ILLUSTRATED BY

MARION SATTERLEE

“The first conscious thought about wild flowers was to find out their names—the first conscious pleasure—and then I began to see so many that I had not previously noticed. Once you wish to identify them, there is nothing escapes, down to the little white chickweed of the path and the moss of the wall.”

—RICHARD JEFFERIES

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1893

COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK

CONTENTS

PAGE Preface, vii How to Use the Book, ix Introductory Chapter, 1 Explanation of Terms, 8 Notable Plant Families, 13 Flower Descriptions: I. White, 22 II. Yellow, 113 III. Pink, 173 IV. Red, 213 V. Blue and Purple, 229 VI. Miscellaneous, 276 Index to Latin Names, 287 „ to English Names, 292 „ of Technical Terms, 298

One of these days some one will give us a hand-book of our wild flowers, by the aid of which we shall all be able to name those we gather in our walks without the trouble of analyzing them. In this book we shall have a list of all our flowers arranged according to color, as white flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers, pink flowers, etc., with place of growth and time of blooming.

JOHN BURROUGHS.

PREFACE

The pleasure of a walk in the woods and fields is enhanced a hundredfold by some little knowledge of the flowers which we meet at every turn. Their names alone serve as a clew to their entire histories, giving us that sense of companionship with our surroundings which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of outdoor life. But if we have never studied botany it has been no easy matter to learn these names, for we find that the very people who have always lived among the flowers are often ignorant of even their common titles, and frequently increase our eventual confusion by naming them incorrectly. While it is more than probable that any attempt to attain our end by means of some “Key,” which positively bristles with technical terms and outlandish titles, has only led us to replace the volume in despair, sighing with Emerson, that these scholars

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names!

So we have ventured to hope that such a book as this will not be altogether unwelcome, and that our readers will find that even a bowing acquaintance with the flowers repays one generously for the effort expended in its achievement. Such an acquaintance serves to transmute the tedium of a railway journey into the excitement of a tour of discovery. It causes the monotony of a drive through an ordinarily uninteresting country to be forgotten in the diversion of noting the wayside flowers, and counting a hundred different species where formerly less than a dozen would have been detected. It invests each boggy meadow and bit of rocky woodland with almost irresistible charm. Surely Sir John Lubbock is right in maintaining that “those who love Nature can never be dull,” provided that love be expressed by an intelligent interest rather than by a purely sentimental rapture.

Ninety-seven of the one hundred and four plates in this book are from original drawings from nature. Of the remaining seven plates, six (Nos. LXXX., XCIX., CI., XXII., XLII., LXXXI.), and the illustration of the complete flower, in the Explanation of Terms, are adapted with alterations from standard authors, part of the work in the first three plates mentioned being original. Plate IV. has been adapted from “American Medicinal Plants,” by kind permission of the author, Dr. C. F. Millspaugh. The reader should always consult the “Flower Descriptions” in order to learn the actual dimensions of the different plants, as it has not always been possible to preserve their relative sizes in the illustrations. The aim in the drawings has been to help the reader to identify the flowers described in the text, and to this end they are presented as simply as possible, with no attempt at artistic arrangement or grouping.

We desire to express our thanks to Miss Harriet Procter, of Cincinnati, for her assistance and encouragement. Acknowledgment of their kind help is also due to Mrs. Seth Doane, of Orleans, Massachusetts, and to Mr. Eugene P. Bicknell, of Riverdale, New York. To Dr. N. L. Britton, of Columbia College, we are indebted for permission to work in the College Herbarium.

NEW YORK, March 15, 1893.

HOW TO USE THE BOOK

Many difficulties have been encountered in the arrangement of this guide to the flowers. To be really useful such a guide must be of moderate size, easily carried in the woods and fields; yet there are so many flowers, and there is so much to say about them, that we have been obliged to control our selection and descriptions by certain regulations which we hope will commend themselves to the intelligence of our readers and secure their indulgence should any special favorite be conspicuous by its absence.

These regulations may be formulated briefly as follows:

1. Flowers so common as to be generally recognized are omitted, unless some peculiarity or fact in their history entitles them to special mention.

Under this, Buttercups, Wild Roses, Thistles, and others are ruled out.

2. Flowers so inconspicuous as generally to escape notice are usually omitted.