Part 7

Sometimes children catch bees in empty milkweed pods. The bees make a great buzzing in the pod, and it is not fair to keep them long, for it interferes with their honey-gathering or pollen-collecting. If there is anything a bee hates, it is to waste time, with so many hungry mouths at home waiting to be fed.

Like the thistles, when the milkweed seeds become quite dry they often drop away from their plumes, particularly if they strike against something when sailing about.

There are a number of species of milkweeds. One common species has bright, orange flowers, and is called butterfly weed. Its flowers look a little like bright butterflies, and the butterflies are fond of its honey.

There is a lovely milkweed in Florida that has large pea-green leaves with broad pink veins running all through them.

Some species of milkweeds have long, slender, smooth pods, and very likely you have noticed them along the roadside.

LETTUCE.

Those who have seen lettuce only on the table, or growing in the early spring garden or in the green-house, will feel like laughing at the idea of lettuces flying!

Yet they do fly. At least their seeds do.

Sometimes lettuces look like rosettes growing out of the ground, and sometimes they look like little cabbages. But that is only the leaves.

If lettuces are let alone and not picked, in time they will “go to seed”; a stalk will grow up from the middle, with small leaves on it and a great many little flower heads that look somewhat like tiny dandelions.

These flower heads are made like those of the dandelion or thistle.

The lettuce has no prickles, but its juice is milky and bitter, and gets more bitter as the plant grows older. The lettuce flowers have akenes like the dandelion, and each akene has a plume like that of the dandelion.

Away fly the pretty plumed akenes, and lettuce is thus sown by the wayside. But one seldom sees garden lettuce growing, except in gardens; for it is so tender the strong, rough weeds choke and kill it.

There is a wild lettuce, however, that has a large number of flower heads, and of course a great many pretty, silky, tufted akenes. These lettuces sometimes shine as if they had been snowed upon when their silky, white plumed akenes first open out.

I advise you to see if you can find some of them next summer. The best place to look is alongside fences and hedges and in the corners of pastures.

There is a lettuce so troublesome to the farmer that large sums of money have been appropriated to exterminate it. It is called the Prickly Lettuce, because its leaves and stalks are prickly. It came to this country from Europe. It is quite as destructive to the farmer’s crops as is the Canada thistle.

CLEMATIS.

Of course the clematis akenes fly. Nothing so fluffy as they, in the seed world, could do otherwise.

The wild clematis that grows over the bushes in some swamps is a beautiful vine with glossy leaves and clusters of pretty white flowers. After the snowy flowers have gone it is still beautiful, for then each little akene waves a long, shining, curly plume. The whole vine is covered with these shining, twining plumes.

But a day comes when they no longer shine. Each curling plume looks like a mass of down, for its parts have separated and stand out, and we now see that it is shaped like a feather, a downy fluffy feather. The whole vine is a soft fluffy mass.

This does not last long, for the akenes leave the parent vine and are borne aloft on their airy plumes by the wind that scatters them far and wide.

Some fall upon the right kind of soil, where they are covered by the leaves of autumn, and lie safely until spring comes. Then they wake up and grow each into a beautiful clematis vine with shining leaves.

There is a beautiful clematis with large blue-purple flowers that grows in the mountains of Virginia and in some other places.

ASTERS AND GOLDEN-ROD.

Asters and golden-rod blossom in the fall. Then the country roads are lovely to walk over, and the fields are as bright as can be with blue or purple or white asters and yellow golden-rod.

Some kinds of golden-rod and asters blossom in the summer, but most of them wait until late in the season. They are almost the last flowers to come and almost the last to go.

When their bright flowers fade they are still pretty. Each “flower” of the asters is like the dandelion, a cluster of very small flowers, and the golden-rod flower head is made up of very many tiny flowers.

Each little flower has its own akene and plume quite like the dandelion, but a great deal smaller, and in time the clusters that were flowers become clusters of soft downy plumes.