Gay companies of these charming, bright little blossoms hidden away in the woods suggest a swarm of tiny mauve butterflies that have settled among the wintergreen leaves.Unlike the common milkwort and many of its kin that grow in clover-like heads, each one of the gay wings has beauty enough to stand alone, Its oddity of structure, its lovely color and enticing fringe, lead one to suspect it of extraordinary desire to woo some insect that will carry its pollen from blossom to blossom and so enable the plant to produce cross-fertilized seed to counteract the evil tendencies resulting from the more prolific self-fertilized cleistogamous flowers buried in the ground below.It has been said that the fringed polygala keeps "one flower for beauty and one for use"; "one playful flower for the world, another for serious use and posterity"; but surely the showy flowers, the "giddy sisters," borne by all cleistogamous species to save them from degenerating through close inbreeding, are no idle, irresponsible beauties.Let us watch a bumblebee as she alights on the convenient fringe which edges the lower petal of this milkwort.Now the weight of her body so depresses the keel, or tubular petals, wherein the stamens and pistil lie protected from the rain and useless insects, that as soon as it is pressed downward a spoon-tipped pistil pushes out the pollen through the slit on the top on the bee's abdomen.The stigmatic surface of the pistil is on the opposite side of the spoon, nearest the base of the flower, to guard against self-pollination.After the pollen has been removed, a bumblebee, already dusted from other blossoms, must leave some on the stigma as she sucks the nectar.
Indeed, every feature possessed by this pretty flower has been developed for the most serious purpose of life - the salvation of the species.
Only locally common throughout a wide area, embracing the eastern half of the United States and Canada, is the RACEMED MILKWORT (P.
polygama), whose small, purple-pink, but showy flowers, clustered along the upper part of numerous leafy stems, are found in dry soil during June and July.Like the fringed milkwort, this one bears many cleistogamous, or blind flowers, on underground branches, flowers that always set an abundance of fertile self-planted seed in case of failure to form any on the part of their showy sisters, which are utterly dependent upon the bee's ministrations.During prolonged stormy weather few insects are abroad.
SWAMP ROSE-MALLOW; MALLOW ROSE
(Hibiscus Moscheutos) Mallow family Flowers - Very large, clear rose pink, sometimes white, often with crimson center, 4 to 7 in.across, solitary, or clustered on peduncles at summit of stems.Calyx 5-cleft, subtended by numerous narrow bractlets; 5 large, veined petals; stamens united into a valvular column bearing anthers on the outside for much of its length; 1 pistil partly enclosed in the column, and with five button-tipped stigmatic branches above.Stem: 4 to 7 ft.tall, stout, from perennial root.Leaves: 3 to 7 in.long, tapering, pointed, egg-shaped, densely white, downy beneath lower leaves, or sometimes all, lobed at middle.
Preferred Habitat - Brackish marshes, riversides, lake shores, saline situations.
Flowering Season - August-September.
Distribution - Massachusetts to the Gulf of Mexico, westward to Louisiana; found locally in the interior, but chiefly along Atlantic seaboard.
Stately ranks of these magnificent flowers, growing among the tall sedges and "cat-tails" of the marshes, make the most insensate traveler exclaim at their amazing loveliness.To reach them one must don rubber boots and risk sudden seats in the slippery ooze; nevertheless, with spade in hand to give one support, it is well worthwhile to seek them out and dig up some roots to transplant to the garden.Here, strange to say, without salt soil or more water than the average garden receives from showers and hose, this handsomest of our wild flowers soon makes itself delightfully at home under cultivation.Such good, deep earth, well enriched and moistened, as the hollyhock thrives in, suits it perfectly.Now we have a better opportunity to note how the bees suck the five nectaries at the base of the petals and collect the abundant pollen of the newly opened flowers, which they perforce transfer to the five button-shaped stigmas intentionally impeding the entrance to older blossoms.Only its cousin the hollyhock, a native of China, can vie with the rose-mallow's decorative splendor among the shrubbery; and the ROSE OF CHINA (Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis), cultivated in greenhouses here, eclipse it in the beauty of the individual blossom.This latter flower, whose superb scarlet corolla stains black, is employed by the Chinese married women, it is said, to discolor their teeth; but in the West Indies it sinks to even greater ignominy as a dauber for blacking shoes!